by Casey Gerald
It was an empty offer, I decided, given that I’d been sneaking into the woman’s house for three years by then. So I let him go alone and I let him return to find me in his room, watching The Pursuit of Happyness. I didn’t say hey until long after the movie ended, when I looked over and saw him sitting on the floor with his head between his knees. I hugged his neck and said I’m sorry, even though I can’t remember whether I truly was.
I do remember that he was sick of me.
You ready to go?
That was the first thing River said when we woke the next morning. He grabbed my bag as soon as I finished packing and flung it in the trunk of his Ford Bronco. Took off driving up I-35 like Dallas was something worth racing toward. We said nothing for the first thirty minutes or so, only noise was the radio and the cars passing and the tires on the road and then the Bronco’s engine.
Fuck.
River’s jaw had slacked a bit. He turned the radio off.
Fuck.
He studied the instrument panel, glanced at the smoke rising from the Bronco’s hood, then slowly guided the dying truck off the highway and onto the gravel shoulder that separated it from seemingly endless acres of weeds and wildflowers. He got out to pop the hood and I got out to sit in the field, away from him.
The hood crashed back in place and River walked over to sit down, not right next to me but within earshot. The sun had been hiding behind clouds, but when I looked at him, it shined its light on his face, squinted and freckled as only it ever was in the sun.
Guess you won’t be getting rid of me so soon, huh.
He tried to strangle a smile.
Guess not.
We sat there in the grass and gravel, silent, picking at pebbles. We laughed at the same time, or close behind each other, though maybe not at the same thing. He was so beautiful, blinded by all that sun and rage.
You know what’s wrong with it? I asked.
Nope. And all I got is gas money to get to Dallas and back. I’ono what we’re gonna do.
I could lie and say I felt some sympathy for him, but I didn’t. I was always annoyed by this—his constant lack of money or well-developed plans, or other things I thought twenty-three-year-olds should have. Now I know that twenty-three-year-olds don’t hardly have nothing, ever.
Like the deus ex machina she’d always been, whenever she wasn’t trying to get me killed, Tashia was the one who prevented us from being stuck on the highway like day-old armadillos. She kept money in an account for me, to make sure I had food and a little pocket change at school. There was over two hundred dollars in the account that day, so we called AAA and got the Bronco fixed. River drove the rest of the way at a decent person’s pace, and at some point in all this, one of us said I love you and this stood in for all the things we had not said, did not know how to say.
If only we had found more words. Instead of pinning me down and making me bleed, he could have said You hurt my feelings. Instead of waking him out of his sleep, choking him like that, I could have said I don’t want you to leave. We had learned so well as boys to keep our mouths shut and now, as boy-men, we knew no other way. Perhaps we would have tried harder during those 259 days, if there had not been so many moments when our silence was worth a thousand years of noise, when our cloistered world felt like a perfect hiding place, as it did that final summer.
On summer nights in Texas, the cruel overseer-heat of day goes in for some shut-eye and sends out the sweetest breeze you’ll ever feel in your life. Not a cool breeze, but a breeze that feels like the warm hand of God come to wipe away all tears. In a dim-lit town like Carson you can close your eyes and see a trace of stars through your eyelids. You open them and it takes four seconds to find Orion’s Belt. There it is, River. He looked and saw it, too.
We sat in that night-star silence, in my car with the sunroof open, on a park bench under giant live oak trees, and our lungs felt twice the normal size, filled with that breeze and each other’s air. Our hands lined up so that it went my finger then his then mine then his, from thumb to pinkie. And I played the same song over and over, or sang it to him.
I hope that you’re the one
If not, you are the prototype
I did not just hope. I believed. And though River sometimes rolled his How many times are we gonna hear this eyes and laughed when the song came on, he too must have been a believer, because as the end of summer neared, he suggested moving to Connecticut, living together, introducing me to his family and such.
These plans, these feelings, this belief . . . all of it became, almost suddenly, a terrible problem for me, though it took a long time to understand why, and even longer to admit.
I could blame God—at least the God that I had been given. I could still remember all the sermons and scriptures, like Papa’s favorite: What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? But for better or worse, I had already accepted my godlessess—or god-apart-ness—and River seemed a decent consolation.
I could blame the society in which I had been born and still lived. Could say that I was unable to bear being cast out of my family (who, as far as I know, have never cast anybody out, for anything), or accept the scorn of my peers, or endure the stares and sneers of strangers. Perhaps this played a role, even a small one‚ especially since I was in the early stages of crafting a new life, or a new story, in the image of perfection. But while it was not clear how River would fit into that story, I did not think it impossible.
I could definitely blame River, which I did at the time. Could say that there were irreconcilable differences, whatever that means. I may not have mastered many interpersonal skills in our 259 days, but I had developed a virtuosic gift for placing blame, so I blamed him for everything. Even found a way to interpret his offer to move to New Haven as a sign that he was not trying to be serious about his life.
But the truth is that I was the one unwilling to try. Perhaps unable to try because I could not love him, after all.
By love I do not mean the strong dramatic feelings that we see on television, or hear in songs and from people who act like they know what they’re talking about. What I mean is something that I read many years later in a book by bell hooks, conveniently titled All About Love.
Love, she defines, via M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm, is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
If I had known this then, I might have stopped saying I love you, or I might have tried to make the words mean something, or I might have realized that the terror I felt had less to do with River and more to do with the fact that, by twenty years old, I no longer believed in people. I found the prospect of needing a human being, trusting them, extending myself for them, to be more horrifying than being abandoned, or almost killed, or damned for all eternity. People seemed to be the most dangerous things in this world.
And so what I felt as my days with River rolled toward Something Major was a bit like what I felt when I started to tell you this story. It was as though I stood atop a very tall building and gusts of wind were whooshing all over me and I was trying to decide whether to jump—not to my death, but into this vast unknown that was calling out for me. I knew, or felt strongly enough to consider it a fact, that the work could not be done unless I jumped, unless I gave it all or none, unless I was placed into the dipper and poured back down on the world. Luckily, I could not stay up on the rooftop of that life I was living before I sat to tell you this story, so I took the plunge and here I am. We’ll see what comes of it.
But back there on that rooftop with River, I could not jump. For one, the rooftop seemed too safe to take a chance. Even more, so much of my experience had been not jumping from rooftops, but being pushed off without much notice and against my will. And part of me wanted to prove, if only to myself, that I could do some pushing for a change. So I did.
When August came and I re
turned to New Haven, I made what I’d decided would be my final call to him, one afternoon.
I don’t think we should be together right now, River.
He held the phone.
So you’re saying we’re breaking up?
I looked at my fingernails for a long time.
Yeah, I guess.
He suggested that we take a break, not talk to anyone, not sleep with anyone. See if we could work things out. I explained that this made no sense, that we needed to be adults. Adults!
And that’s when he told me how long it had been.
From December to August 17, nearly 259 consecutive days of “I love you,” “you’re the only one I ever wanna be with,” and “excruciatingly honest.” A man who took you from not expecting anything of him, to showing you that you can trust and depend on him to be there for everything . . . Congrats on dissolving this.
Saying thank you didn’t seem appropriate. So I said nothing, for months. Kept my word and refused to call, except for the few times I called from an unidentified number and held the phone in silence, just to hear him say hello.
This, you see, is why I say that these days were perhaps the most important in my life: once I ended them, I had no doubt that I could do anything, no matter how vicious, how hard, how painful or implausible. So although the Apostle Paul wrote in that same letter to the church at Corinth—Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing—he did not tell it all. Paul should have added what I came to learn: that without love, you are something. You are a danger to yourself and others.
Yet somehow, after breaking this one black boy, I was put in charge of building all the black boys at Yale.
chapter SIXTEEN
If you catch a whiff of confusion when you read that I, Casey Gerald, one of the most bitter reclusive boys to ever attend Yale College, evolved almost overnight (two years of nights, actually) into a leader of anybody, then you are not alone. Most of the students were shocked, too. A decade has passed and I still struggle to explain—to understand for myself—not how it happened (that’s simple enough and I’ll let you in on most of it), but why. So let’s just start with what I know for sure: it wasn’t my idea.
There had been, for over a hundred years, the black fraternities, and the Freemasons, and the Boulé, and the many local and regional associations, and the black men’s college at Atlanta, and, of course, the prisons, which have stood since Emancipation as the most sincere national effort to gather black men in one place, even if you consider the Million Man March. But aside from all this, founding an organization to support young black men was not my idea because it came as a suggestion from two boys at Cornell who, early in the summer of 2007, proposed that all the black boys from all the Ivy League colleges unite to form a Men of Color Council—a forum to share our wisdom, our connections, and our lives with one another. To network: a word that, having hardly heard it before going to Yale, and having heard it over and over again ever since, I have come to believe defines today the way repent defined the days of my youth and discover defined the days of Columbus and Cortés and Drake, with the same promise of glory for some, of ruin for others, and of a new world, like it or not, for all.
What you think about this, Casey? Daniel asked through a phone somewhere after speaking with the Cornell boys, assuming they had also contacted me since they claimed to have tried to track down every black boy who attended one of the seven other Ivies. Apparently this had taken only a week.
All these niggas wanna do is get together for some mixers and galas. Fuck that.
He cackled—Yeah, man, you probably right—but he knew that I was serious. We had gone nearly a year without speaking on account of him trying to get me to like the people at Yale, to give them a shot, make some friends, ingratiate myself. It had not worked. I missed my people too much, though I could not say for sure what I meant by that.
From roughly ages eight to eighteen, I had understood my people to mean black people. There was little reason not to. We had in my corner of Oak Cliff something close to what sociologists call institutional completeness: The condition of a group within a larger society where the major institutions—economy, politics, family, schooling—are reproduced, thus enabling the smaller group to have little social connection with the larger group.
In practice this meant that the teachers were black, the bank tellers were black, the tax man and the trash man and the mailwoman were black, and even (until recently) the yard workers were black. The dope fiends were black, the dope dealers were black, and (for the most part) the cops who arrested them were black. My best friends and sworn enemies were black, all.
There was a great gift in this: it never occurred to me that I was inferior because I was black. I was informed that white people were racist. That America was racist. That black people in America had been knocked down for four hundred years—the number was always four hundred years; even today, thirty years after my birth, it is still four hundred years. But I was assured that this was because there was something wrong with white people, not with me. Some said that white people were the devil. Some said that white people were mean. Some said that white people just didn’t know any better. Well, I knew at least one black person who seemed like the devil, and had met a fair number who were terribly mean, and was the offspring of two who didn’t seem to know any better. In fact, it did not seem to me that anybody ever knew why they or anybody else did anything, so I didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out the motives of white people. All I knew was that I was not white and that I would have been heartbroken if I had been born white.
But this institutional completeness was a bit too complete, since it wasn’t until I arrived at Yale that it dawned on me that the defining trait of my people was not only that we had so much pigment in our skin but that we had so little money in our bank accounts, so little food on our tables, so few books in our classrooms, that we did not take family vacations, that we did not go to the museum, that we did not pay for our lunch at school, did not buy our toys at Toys’R’Us, did not order steak in restaurants, if we ever went, did not go to the dentist for our six-month cleaning, if for anything, did not have vision exams to know we needed glasses, which we could not afford anyway. And we did not add all this up and call ourselves poor—perhaps because it was so obvious that it did not need to be said, or because it was so common that we found more interesting language for each other, or because we were ashamed. I’m not sure. Whatever the case, the black students at Yale were a mighty rich discovery—not only because they had so much more or had lived so differently than I had, but also and especially because they looked at me as though they were itching to pose Du Bois’s question: How does it feel to be a problem?
Quickly and surely I began to suspect, as perhaps the coolie suspects when he first encounters the Brahmin, that these elect were invested in the distinction between their kind and mine, between the blacks and the niggers, began to suspect that those of us who spent our lives in the Left Behind had been kept there, in the dark, blind to these other worlds, these higher reaches, these possibilities, for a reason. I was not sure what the reason was and I did not have any proof, but I sure felt that this was all too fishy to be a simple coincidence. And the more time I spent in their midst, the more I became convinced that they were the problem—not any individual boy or girl or mother or father but the idea that they represented, of a class apart, and all the trappings that came with it: the mixer, the gala, the networking reception, the panels to discuss blackness in theory when actual blackness was having one hell of a hard time right down the street—when I was having a hard time right under their noses. My desire to overthrow them was personal, I admit. It had to be personal.
Above all, Che Guevara wrote to his children not long before he was executed, always be capable of feeling deeply any i
njustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.
I had not heard of Che at that time and now that I have, I want you to know that I do not agree with everything he did—but I do thank the man for helping me explain and understand myself: the retching stomach knot and threat of tears at the sight or sound of something, anything, that struck me as unnecessary or unfair human suffering (especially if it was my human suffering)—this was the most innate quality I possessed, beautiful or not. I don’t say that to sound tough or brave or even to take any credit, because I never did anything to call it up or make it stronger. It was a gift—just sitting there waiting for me, as early as Halloween 1992, and was, now that I think about it, almost revealed to the world, or at least my little Oak Cliff world, in 1999.
The incident I’m remembering involved, of course, a speech. Don’t remember what it was about but I do remember that a passel of adults liked it so much that they decided to send me to Australia, which I’m not sure I had heard of before 1999, as part of some “student ambassador” scheme that Dwight Eisenhower had cooked up before he died. I didn’t have any problem going to Australia but I also didn’t have any money, so Ms. Davis or somebody decided that I should say my speech once again, before a larger group of adults—all men, for some reason. Two of the men in attendance were politicians, an elected judge and a state senator. I gave the speech and the adults clapped. The state senator bowled his way to the microphone and announced that he was going to write a thousand-dollar check for this great cause. Judge, you write one, too! he cried. The judge, dragged into this honorable swinging-dick competition, jumped to the microphone and retorted—You got it, Doc! And all the men clapped for the judge and the senator and somebody took a picture of them and then they all went home, feeling good, and I went home, too, also feeling pretty good. This had to be shortly after Martin King Day ’99.