Well, I say friends, but we weren’t really friends, not then.
I don’t think I was using Larry as my Show Nigger, but I do think he became my Guinea Pig Nigger, and I’m sure now that my curiosity was a bit overbearing at times, yes, I’m positive. There were too many things I wanted to know about Negroes, and Larry was the only Negro I knew, so I pursued him relentlessly, asking him whatever came to mind, even if I felt or knew the question would embarrass him. That sounds terrible now, I’m really quite ashamed of it, like superior white massa asking bare-ass pickaninny do he stand when he pee like de white man do. But I had the idea then (or at least this is what I told myself in defense of my own position) that the only way Larry and I could explore our samenesses was to understand our differences. We had to do this, I told him, because the Negro as we had invented him in America simply was not the equal of the white man.
The first time I told Larry he was not my equal, he punched me in the mouth. That was when we were still getting to be friends. The second time I told him was when we were both seniors and feeling like big shots with our orange-and-black senior beanies, the big T for Talmadge on the front superimposed with the hopeful date of our graduation, ’64. We were coming past the playing field where the soccer team was practicing head shots, Coach Lambert throwing the ball repeatedly at the skulls of his players, and they dizzily batting it back to him. It was a bright fall Connecticut day, clear and sharp and invigorating. Larry was wearing his team sweater (he was on the swimming team and had earned his varsity letter as a freshman) over a white turtleneck — brown skin, black sweater, orange arm stripes and letter T, orange-and-black beanie, and behind him the riotous plumage of autumn, red, orange, gold, tan — color was everywhere around us, and very much on my mind.
I opened the subject cautiously this time; he had a devastating right jab, and I was very fond of my teeth. I also opened it guiltily, wondering whether all my talk about equality or the lack of it wasn’t merely a coverup for what was actually prejudice. Was I, in effect, simply taking an unpopular position (You are not my equal, Larry, and I will explain why) to screen an even less popular position? (I do not like the color of your skin, Larry, nor the way you talk, or walk, or smell. In short, I envy the size of your cock.) I had, for example, never been able to stand the complexion of Indians (not American Indians; I had never seen one — but Indian Indians) who always seemed to me to be the color of dried anemic dog shit.
Well, I said, and Larry listened, ready to take offense, what I meant when we talked about this in June, you see, is that the white man has forced this goddam peculiar situation...
Oh, peculiar, Larry said. Is that what it is? Peculiar?
Yes, because it’s unnatural. Well, you know what I mean, Larry, all the business, for example, of not allowing slaves to marry. How can we expect the Negro male today to accept responsibility if his ancestors...
He’s lazy and shiftless, right? Larry said.
Look, I said, I’m trying to be serious here. I’m talking about not allowing the Negro to get a good education or a meaningful job. I’m talking about all the crap the white man’s forced upon the Negro in order to create an inferior human being.
Here we go again, Larry said.
Larry, I’m trying to say that the white man’s task in the next generation...
The white man’s burden, you mean.
I mean our task, all right, yours and mine, not only the white man’s, ours, okay? Our task in this next generation’ll be to cut through all that crap and create a new American Negro who...
By selective breeding, right? Like livestock, right?
Fuck you, I said.
Fuck you, Larry said. You’re a bigot like all the rest. You’re just a smarter bigot, is all.
Okay, I said.
You don’t want me to be your equal, Larry said.
I want you to be my fuckin’ equal, I said.
Then get me a date with a white girl, he said.
Get yourself a date with a white girl, I answered.
He didn’t tell me until much later, when we trusted each other enough to talk openly about girls (and I honestly believed that was the last barricade) that he had taken my advice and got himself a date with a white girl named Patricia Converse from Stamford, who was no prize, but who had sucked him out of his mind. I felt an initial flaring of anger, don’t tell me prejudice doesn’t die hard. Don’t tell me my aversion to the color of Indian Indians (not American Indians, mind you) had nothing to do with Negroes. I visualized Patricia Converse as a very fair blonde with blue eyes, I saw Larry’s ugly black cock in her mouth, and I felt violently protective of all my women, big white massa standin in de doorway guardin Missy Annabelle home fum Atlanta, don’t tell me, man. Don’t tell me I didn’t have to step on something inside me and crush it that day, smashing what I thought was the final barricade, and seeing a small flash of triumph in Larry’s eyes, knowing he savored the image of White Womanhood Defiled that flitted through my mind, and wanting this time to punch him in the mouth because he was my equal now or at least I thought he was. What I didn’t understand was that I was not yet his equal.
To become his equal (and I didn’t learn this until we arrived in Mississippi), I would have to stand with him on a red clay dam, and be shot to death by white men to whom my color meant nothing, shadowed as it was by my Negro friend beside me.
I was not willing to die for Larry Peters.
I sat opposite him in a very clean cell in a very clean jail, both of us tired and depressed, neither of us speaking. From the far end of the corridor, we recognized Lyndon Johnson’s voice coming from the television set, and Larry said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Shhh.”
“My fellow Americans,” Johnson said, “as President and Commander-in-Chief, it is my duty to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply...”
“What does he mean?” I asked Larry.
“Those PT-boats a few days ago,” Larry said. “The ones that attacked our destroyer.”
“That reply,” Johnson said, “is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these hostile operations.”
“There it is,” Larry said. “The son of a bitch is declaring war!”