Foy looked up at me from his chair, but didn’t stop talking or typing. Speaking in rapid-fire, unintelligible word salad into the phone, he wasn’t making much sense, something about high-speed rail and the return of the Pullman porter. The Mercedes coupe’s Pirelli whitewall tires were bald. Yellow foam oozed from the cracked and blistered leather seats like pus. Foy was probably homeless, but he refused to sell his watch, or a car that, at auction, even in its fucked-up condition, was worth several hundred thousand dollars. I had to ask.
“What are you writing?” Foy dropped the phone to his shoulder.
“A book of essays called Me Talk White One Day.”
“Foy, when’s the last time you had an original idea?”
Absolutely unoffended, Foy thought for a second, then said, “Probably not since your dad died,” before returning to his phone call.
* * *
I returned to Foy’s old house to find Hominy and Butterfly skinny-dipping in the pool, a little surprised that no nosy neighbors had bothered to call the police. One old black man looks like all the rest, I suppose. Night fell, and the underwater light flicked on automatically and quietly. The soft light-blue of a pool lit up at night is my favorite color. Hominy, pretending he couldn’t swim, was in the deep end, holding on to Butterfly’s ample flotation devices for all he was worth. He hadn’t found what he was looking for, his movies, but what he had managed to secure seemed to tide him over. I stripped down and slid into the water. No wonder Foy was broke, the temperature had to have been at least 90 degrees.
Floating on my back, I saw the North Star flicker through the steam rising from the water, pointing to a freedom that I didn’t even know if I needed. I thought of my father, whose ideas paid for that bank-owned property. I turned over into a dead man’s float and tried to position my body in the posture he was in when I found him dead in the street. What were my dad’s last words before they shot him? You don’t know who my son is. All this work, Dickens, the segregation, Marpessa, the farming, and I still don’t even know who I am.
You have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?
I was as lost as I ever was, thinking seriously about tearing out the farmland, uprooting the crops, selling off the livestock, and putting in a big-ass wave pool. Because how cool would it be to surf in the backyard?
Twenty-three
About two weeks after seeking the Lost Film Treasure of Laurel Canyon, the secret was out. The New-ish Republic magazine, which hadn’t had a child on its cover since the Lindbergh baby, broke the story. Above the caption “The New Jim Crow: Has Public Education Clipped the Wings of the White Child?” was a twelve-year-old white boy, posed as the pint-sized symbol of reverse racism. The new Jim Crow stood on the steps of Chaff Middle School wearing a heavy gold chain. Unruly tufts of dirty blond hair peeked out from under his wave cap and noise-reduction headphones. He toted an Ebonics textbook in one hand and a basketball in the other. Gold metal braces flashed through a lip-curling snarl, and the XXXL T-shirt he wore read Energy = an Emcee2.
A long time ago, my father taught me that whenever you see a question on the cover of a news magazine, the answer is always “No,” because the editorial staff knows that questions with “Yes” answers would, like graphic cigarette warnings and close-ups of pus-oozing genitalia that tend not to deter but encourage smoking and unsafe sex, scare the reader off. So you get yellow journalism like: O. J. Simpson and Race: Will the Verdict Split America? No. Has TV Gone Too Far? No. Is Anti-Semitism on the March Again? No, because it never halted. Has Public Education Clipped the Wings of the White Child? No, because a week after that issue hit the newsstands, five white kids, their backpacks filled with books, rape whistles, and mace, hopped off a rented school bus and attempted to reintegrate Chaff Middle School, where Assistant Principal Charisma Molina stood in the doorway, barring entrance to her quasi-segregated institution.
Even if Charisma hadn’t counted on all the publicity about how if Chaff continued to improve at its current rate, it would become the fourth-highest-ranked public school in the county within the next year, she should’ve known that while 250 poor colored kids getting inferior educations will never be front-page news, the denial of even one white student access to a decent education would create a media shit storm. What no one could’ve foreseen, however, was a coalition of fed-up white parents listening to the advice of Foy Cheshire and pulling their children from underperforming public schools and overpriced private ones. And calling for a return to the forced busing many of their parents had so vehemently protested against a generation prior.
Too broke and embarrassed to provide an armed escort, the state of California watched idly as the sacrificial lambs of reintegration, Suzy Holland, Hannah Nater, Robby Haley, Keagan Goodrich, and Melonie Vandeweghe, exited the bus under the protection of not the National Guard but the magic of live television and the loud mouth of Foy Cheshire. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d seen him living out of his car, and from what I’d heard, no one showed up for the last Dum Dum meeting, even though the noted community organizer _ _ r _ _ _ O _ _ _ _ was scheduled to speak.
Shoulders hunched and arms held up protectively in front of their faces, the Dickens Five, as the quintet would come to be known, braced themselves for the pillory of rocks and bottles as they ran the gauntlet and into history. But unlike Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 3, 1957, the city of Dickens didn’t spit in their faces and hurl racial epithets; rather, it begged them for autographs, asked if they already had dates for the junior prom. Yet when the would-be enrollees reached the top of the stairs, there stood Assistant Principal Charisma doing her best Governor Faubus, refusing to budge, her arm ramrod straight against the doorjamb. Hannah, the tallest of the bunch, tried to step around her, but Charisma held firm.
“No Anglos allowed.”
Hominy and I were on the other side of the fray. Standing behind Charisma, and like anyone else apart from the custodial and food services staff at Little Rock Central High School or the University of Mississippi in 1962, on the wrong side of history. Hominy was in school that day to tutor Jim Crow. Charisma had summoned me to read the business letter that accompanied the mailed edition of Foy Cheshire’s latest reimagined multicultural text, Of Rice and Yen, an all-Chinese adaptation of Steinbeck’s classic set in the days of the railroad coolie. The book was a carbon copy of the original text sans articles and with all the ls and rs transposed. Maybe evelybody in whore damn wolrd scaled, aflaid each other. I’ll never understand why after over a half century of Charlie Chan’s Number One Son, the dude in Smashing Pumpkins, dope-ass music producers, skateboarders, and docile Asian wives married to white guys in hardware store commercials, people like Foy Cheshire still think the yen is Chinese currency and that Asian-Americans can’t pronounce their fucking ls, but there was something unnerving about the message’s hurried scrawclass="underline"
Dear Pawn of the Liberal Agenda,
I know that you won’t implement this backbreaking work of swaggering cleverness, but that’s your loss. This book will place me firmly in the autodidactic tradition of authors such as Virginia Woolf, Kawabata, Mishima, Mayakovsky, and DFW. See you this Monday for the first day of school. Class may be on your campus, but you will be auditing my world. Bring a pen, paper, and the nigger-whispering Sellout.