by Casey Gerald
At the time, my going-to had very little to do with the propaganda that I received in New Haven, or in packages that came through the mail—large blue folders with a quote on front that read Yale is at once a tradition, a company of scholars, a society of friends—or in the conference room near the principal’s office at SOC, where the tall pale man with sunken eyes brought Yale’s head coach and a youngish man named Tony Reno, who would be my position coach and whose voice reminded me of a character from the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck Southie projects movies. The three men sat there, shaken by having had to walk through metal detectors to enter a school, solemn in the face of their judge, my sister, and her jury: Ms. Cox, Coach Price, and the school registrar.
It had been quite some time since three white men had sat in a room at South Oak Cliff High School. Though I’m sure that contributed to the skepticism, I also know that my people would have been wary of these men even if they had been the progeny of Martin King himself, simply because the men were outsiders. They could tolerate (if not embrace) a liar, a thief, an idiot—as long as he was one of ours. But woe to the man who hears You must not be from around here. Maybe the whole world is broken up into two kinds of people: those who are outsiders and those who distrust them. I can’t tell you how much good it has done me to have been born into the latter camp, but one by-product is that my going-to was as simple as licking my forefinger and holding it up to see which way the wind of my people blew.
When the meeting at SOC ended, the eyes of my people watched from the hallway as the three Yale men walked a few paces to the front door, then watched from second-floor windows as the men walked thirty yards or so across the yard to the parking lot, then watched the car drive down Marsalis Avenue until it was out of sight. Then they watched each other. Then they watched me. Some of them may have never seen me before, but the men slapped my shoulder and grinned and asked—Son, you the one that’s talkin’ about going to Yale?—and the women hugged my neck and put a little lipstick on my cheek and, after church, a twenty-dollar bill in my hand, and sighed—Baby we are so proud of you! Most of the men and women were strangers to me by name, but they were my people and I felt their breeze and the breeze blew East and the breeze said Go thou.
And once my decision was made, once it was certain that the three men from Yale had not lied about me being accepted, I realized that these people had a lot more than a breeze in them. The first week of February marked the most important event in the lives of high school athletes across America: National Signing Day, when eighteen-year-old boys and girls buy brand-new suits and dresses, and wear crisp ball caps with mascots embroidered on the front, and bring their mothers and fathers and little siblings and next-door neighbors with them to serve as entourage and cheering squad as the sons and daughters sign letters of intent to register with the National Collegiate Athletic Association. No matter that all these friends and loved ones have likely never showed up to school even once over the last four years. No matter that the letters are only one-way pledges from the athlete to the college, not the other way around—which will only come to light when these now-shining boys and girls are sent back home as sad young-old people after missing a few study halls or tearing an ACL or sneaking off with one too many girls. National Signing Day is a quintessentially American affair, when our love for youthful innocence and gaudy pageantry crowds out any trace of the dark past and even bleaker future. Perhaps that’s why, for the first part of National Signing Day, which took place in the crowded South Oak Cliff library, my father showed up with Clarice. They each delivered a brief speech—about tradition, and family, and pride. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
From the ceremony at SOC, Tashia and I—along with the other half-dozen boys in my class who were signing with colleges that day—caravanned out to the field house at the ever-faithful Sprague Stadium for a grand event to honor boys and girls from every high school in Dallas, who were putting their city on the national stage yet again as a go-to destination for any college coach who wanted to win.
The bleachers overflowed with pompoms and cowbells and posters, with people whose shouts gathered, swelled, and rang down at last, just as their baby’s name was called by the announcer.
From SKY-LINE HIGH SCHOOL
Headed to the UNIVERSITY OF OK-LA-HO-MAAA
CHAAARLES HUNTERRR
The bleachers rocked, or at least the section of bleachers where this boy’s family stood, and he was escorted by a loved one down a long strip of red carpet in the center of the basketball court, walking slowly enough to drink up the adulation and to give the cameraman time to walk backward in front of him, recording his procession for the evening news.
Perhaps by design, I was one of the last boys called. After the silence that followed the announcer booming my high school, and the gasp that followed his boom of my soon-to-be college, there was a wail that ripped through the field house once he boomed my name. This was the gust of my people—strong enough to make Kimball Knights and Lincoln Tigers cheer for a South Oak Cliff Golden Bear; strong enough for the feet to stomp in the bleachers with more passion for a boy going to play for a team nobody knew existed than all the boys going off to be Longhorns or Sooners or, someday, even Dallas Cowboys; strong enough for the Sprague groundskeeper to call me over to his cart once the ceremony was over. He started to speak, then caught his bottom lip with his top teeth. He rested his worn hands on my shoulders. Tears rolled down his tired cheeks. Go all the way, son. Go all the way. I was not sure how to get to all the way, but I felt in the hands of the men and heard in the voices of the women and saw in the eyes of the little children that if I went all the way, then they would go, too. And it seemed that they had been waiting so long to go.
So mixed in with, and likely holding together, the standard reasons of going to the best college I could find and joining the best football team that would take me and living just a little over an hour from what they called the best city in the world, my going-to was simply tracing those men’s hands and those women’s voices and those little children’s eyes, even if they pointed to a place at the eastern end of the world that I was too dim to have great passion for.
But the going-away—that was the greater part of my journey. Because not long after Signing Day, but far too long after dropping off the face of my earth, and ignoring all those times I pled with God, and leaving checks in place of a body, my mother came back.
chapter TEN
It didn’t go through, Case.
Huh?
Mama’s check. Last one you put in the bank didn’t go through.
Hmph.
So I call the bank, right? And the man said her account is closed.
Like ain’t nothing in there?
Like it’s closed, Case. You know, closed.
Oh.
Mmhmm.
To understand this exchange, you should know that my sister and I began singing what I’d loosely call duets around the time I was six and she was eleven. Tashia and I would sit in the backseat of Daddy’s black Ford Probe, or walk side by side through the wide wild field that stretched out before our Columbus apartment and separated her middle school from my elementary, or she would stay in the shower for a day and I would stand outside the bathroom door, kicking it until she let me in to use the toilet. Then, with no cue, the window-staring or grass-swiping or tantrum-throwing would pause and one of us, usually her, would start to sing.
As long as I’ve known her, Tashia’s been a soprano—from the diaphragm, a hint of nasal passage. As long as she’s known me, neither of us has known quite what I was: a slobbering no-singing baby; a seven-year-old faltering soprano; a teenage contralto digging for the tenor within. None of this mattered when we sang, though. If I was the lead, I’d open in whatever key felt good to me. If she led, I would join in whatever key felt good to me. I’d glance at her . . . she’d grin. And before the first verse was over, she would have found whatever notes she needed to
make my notes right. Not once did she tell me I was doing it wrong, not once did we sound bad (to me), and not once did I consider how much trouble she went through to find the right notes for both of us. But she always did. Always.
Maybe little brothers exist solely to give their sisters extra burdens—so many burdens that the burdens start to form their identity. Maybe that’s what all boys do to all girls, then to women, then to the world. Or maybe that’s just what I did to my sister. All I know is that I never thanked her for naming me, never apologized for ruining her spine, never thought it my job to find my own right notes, and never heard her complain about any of it. And my blissful tone-deaf singing was the crawl of a sprint to more bliss, more ignorance, more faith (if inaction is a by-product of faith) that my sister would figure it all out—not just those notes but also and especially this new problem, this riddle, this bounced check, this gift which kept us going for two years and which ended on the third day of a fall month because that’s the day the money was supposed to come but didn’t.
And for the first time I could remember, I wanted my sister to fail.
Some of it was the part of me that in another life would have been a right-wing reactionary instead of a queer, the part that nodded when William F. Buckley said his job was to stand athwart history yelling STOP. It’s hard enough to get used to a crappy life. But once you do, you see that even crap can be cozy and the coziness becomes important to you. And even the slightest change—in the name of progress or healing or uplift—feels like a threat to your existence, so you ignore it as long as you can. Sometimes you ignore it even after you supposedly can’t. This is one thing liberals continually miscalculate: the human desire to leave things just the way they are.
Some of it was rooted in the fact that you can wait so long for something that waiting becomes the thing itself. You take your wait and cut it into little stars and the wait makes the face of heaven so fine that you fall in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun. I think that’s what Shakespeare would say, and I’ll agree because of who he is and because I genuinely agree. But I’d go a little further on the point, because I know that if your wait ends, if Romeo lives, if my mother is alive instead of dead or disappeared, then you no longer have something to look forward to in despair, and Juliet’s lines are flat, and the lyrics to “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” don’t feel as raw and deep and compelling. The story has to change, you see, and that’s not only a great deal of work to undertake, but also a real risk, as the new story might not be as marvelous as the old sad one.
But the greatest risk was hope.
For nearly five years, I had prayed for this one thing to happen—well, I also prayed to be delivered from sin until a few of my sins got too good to give up—and each prayer required a little more desperation and earnestness, new words since the old ones had not worked, larger mustard seeds since the mountains had not moved. And over time, each prayer brought with it more resentment and formed a callus on the heart to match the knees. And daily prayer turned into weekly prayer then annual prayer at someone else’s request, then no prayer at all because even dogs and babies know when to stop asking for the same thing. And this journey ended not at hopelessness—only liars and some mass murderers have no hope—but at an anti-hope. This anti-hope seems to be in vogue, mind you, especially amongst those who consider themselves too brilliant or too secular to believe in silly things like unicorns and hope and God. They say that anti-hope is the natural order of things, that the most obvious stance for the man and woman of reason is the stance of Cool Customer, leaning against the wall of the world while the moral arc of the universe bends down to crush them, as it must. And they must convince themselves and others that this anti-hope is not only natural, not only superior, but inevitable. Because otherwise they must admit that anti-hope is a choice—a choice birthed by fear, by a cautious assessment of risk, a selective reading of the past projected onto the future, a failure of the imagination and a crippling of the will. They have to make Hope the province of fools so that Anti-Hope is not revealed to be the province of cowards.
I say this from experience. I was once too weak for hope.
I would have gone right on without it, would have found comfort, if not pleasure, in whatever anti-hope I had, had my sister not always followed through on what she said she would—had she not traced our living mother to Saint Louis.
Well, I talked to a lady at some halfway house up there. She was real nice. Said Mama’s been living there for a little over a year.
Why she live there?
I’ono, Case. Don’t even know. Lady said Mama got arrested a while back, though.
What for?
Good question. Lady said she couldn’t tell me.
Hmph.
I guess we should go up there and get her.
To Saint Louis??
Don’t you think so? Me, you, and Granny can ride up there after Thanksgiving.
I mean. I guess.
I had reached the age by which every boy and girl has mastered the skill of convincing the people in their lives that there is nothing that excites them—not money, not a surprise birthday party, not raising their mother from the dead. But behind my jaded eyes ran fresh electric wonder: I would get to make new mixtapes for the ride, and print out all the directions twice in case I lost a copy. I would get to see Oklahoma for the first time, and maybe a slice of Kansas, and the Saint Louis arch, which had always been my favorite monument aside from the Statue of Liberty, if only because a rapper I liked put the arch in his music videos. And on top of all this magic, we’d pull up to a stately halfway house—the one I’d visited my daddy in was nicer than the house on Old Ox—and do all the reunion stuff that’s cheesy but that looks so nice when people do it on television. Maybe I’d cry a little bit, just a little, but then I’d tell some good mean jokes like Dang, Mama, what you done killed somebody they got you in witness protection or something? Or I’d act like I didn’t know her and reach out to shake her strange hand like the man at the bank when poor people apply for a loan—Hi, I’m Casey . . . and you are? And she’d smack her lips and say Boy, I’m your mama, shutup! And we’d giggle outside the car next to the Mississippi River, which I’d also been waiting a long time to see, ever since I learned that the river ran far away from Mississippi just like everybody else that knew what was good for them.
Six hundred miles to Saint Louis. A good nine-hour drive. Got to make that in a day ’cause ain’t nobody got money to be spending on a hotel. Fine with me. Leave early, drive fast, take some snacks, let’s go.
We left early one morning after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. And as the winter sun snuck west over our heads thinking it was really getting away with something—I ain’t going to Saint Louis with y’all!—we rode into dusk, then night, then the wailing winds along the river, then the part of Saint Louis I’d bet my last dollar included an MLK Boulevard, then into the driveway of a lanky underfed house that tried to hide its shortcomings with a wide porch and a red awning.
Gone and knock, Tash, Granny said.
The image I have in my head is of the empty driver’s seat, the car still running, Tashia’s body shrouded by her thickest coat in the mean wind, now mixed with snow, softly lit by a single streetlight at the nearby corner. A light not strong enough to guide her path all the way to the front door of the house, where she stood and knocked and waited.
Now Debra know she need to come on, Granny muttered.
Tashia lingered at the door and knocked again. Looked out at us—at Granny, since when she looked I turned away. She used one hand to try to insulate her neck with her coat collar, and the other hand to knock again. Hello?!
I sandwiched my head between the front seats to get a better view.
Chile. Granny, again.
I eased back and stared out the window again, looking toward the empty sad far end of the street. Tashia kept standing at
the door. Kept knocking. Granny kept watching her. I had seen enough. Stepped out of the car and let that cat-o’-nine-tails Saint Louis wind rip the decency off my face.
Tashia! Come on. It’s time to go, shit.
I had never cursed in front of Granny. I don’t think I had ever slammed a door, car or other. But right there and then I knew I could not only curse and slam doors but also knock down an old woman if she said a sideways word to me. Maybe she sensed that, or maybe she was too startled to say anything, or maybe she was cursing and slamming doors in her head as she rubbed her hands over and over in her lap.
Tashia was still at the door.
Natashia. Come on.
She peeled herself from the porch and retraced her path through the wind and snow. By the time she plopped down in the backseat I was already pulling out of the driveway and already certain—though I didn’t say it aloud; nobody said anything—that I was going to drive through the night, stopping only for gas that Granny or Tashia would have to wake up and purchase, all those six hundred miles back to Dallas.