Who was I, at seventeen, who sat unmoving,
silent, hands in lap, the one white athlete on a bus
of thirty runners, some asleep and some awake, as three
young men (two sprinters and a shot put thrower)
nodded at each other once, then moved in unison
to settle just across the aisle from me, the sprinters facing
backwards in a seat, the thrower by the student manager
who sat alone, the sun descending on the fallow cotton fields,
the long horizon only broken by a farmhouse every other mile.
The sprinter named Elijah reached across the seat
and took the book from which the manager was reading.
On Elijah’s right, Vermaine, the other sprinter, cocked
his head as if he entertained a message only he could hear,
then made a tsk, tsk sound, his tongue against his teeth,
and slapped the boy across the cheek. The thrower
did not speak, although he placed his arm across the shoulders
of the manager and squeezed—not comforting, but firm,
the way I’d seen a country vet bear down on animals
to keep them motionless as an assistant flicked
a needle just before inserting it into a creature’s flank.
Beside me on the bus the other distance runner, Rodney,
looked at me as if to say, I told you so. Each afternoon
both he and I were sent on longer runs and though we didn’t
always run where we were told (sometimes we walked
the railroad tracks that ran from east to west and cut the town
in half, or hid in the abandoned house we’d found where warped
and swollen floorboards crumbled underneath our feet
and wallpaper unrolled in long, elaborate sheets)
we never came back early to the track where coaches
(every one of them was white) all barked instructions
into megaphones and fleets of runners sprinted intervals,
a straggler sometimes stepping from the track to vomit
in the grass. A week before, when Rodney said to me,
You’ll never understand because you’re white, the two of us
were three miles out along a farm-to-market road so flat
and barren that a screen door snapping closed was heard
one hundred yards away. I had not asked him why
he thought the runners turned so quickly on the manager
(sometimes they waited for him in the locker room, the runners
snapping towels at him, and once—as rumor had it—trapped him
in a locker just before they urinated through the metal cage).
I’d simply asked why Rodney thought that no one said
a word to coaches, parents, anyone at all, to intervene.
The manager’s real name was Timothy, though only teachers
called him that. The runners (most of them were also
football players) hooted Hollywood at him, a name
they trilled like chorus girls while blowing kisses
at him from the hall. Sometimes one athlete dropped his books
and, cackling, bent at waist to pick them up, while, miming
thrusting motions from behind, another athlete pointed
through the doorway of a class (beyond the teacher’s line
of sight) at Timothy, pretending not to see, the muscles
in his neck drawn tight. While other students disappeared
midday to work on roofing houses, fixing cars, both Timothy
and I (along with thirty other honors students) spent our hours
dissecting fetal pigs (a fetal pig is almost like a human fetus,
we were told—the size and organs, weight and skin) or solving
proofs and theorems—problems and philosophies remote
enough from us that we believed they had no bearing on our lives.
The only truth I’d learned by seventeen was that the will
of nature (human, animal, divine) was not to coalesce,
but to divide. The railroad tracks that separated north from south,
the lines chalked back and forth across a football field, the high school
parking lot where student soldiers twirled their wooden rifles
carved from two-by-fours and painted white, the weather sirens
perched five miles from town to split the air by shrieking
out each time a funnel cloud descended from the sky,
seemed proof of this divisive will. When Rodney said,
You’ll never understand because you’re white,
I did not answer him (it was a statement not a question)
and for three more miles we did not say a word.
The track to which we both returned, the lanes
expanding outward so that runners staggered at a race’s start,
reminded me of how we dropped ball bearings in a tank
in physics class to study how concentric circles spread
through water from the single motion of the bearing.
True enough, I’d thought in class, but force is never isolated;
waves extend through other waves until they form a net,
the kind of force that generates no motion, only swells.
Why don’t you act like you are black, was what Vermaine,
Elijah, and the thrower said each time they lashed out,
striking Timothy across his face, or sometimes holding
back to watch him cower as they raised their fists.
What made me silent then? The fear of being hit myself?
But fear is more a symptom than a cause and when I
did not say a word, I took my place among the people
I despised: the Baptist wives whose clicking tongues spread
every rumor they had ever heard, the crowds of twenty thousand
who would gather week by week inside the football stadium
(a coliseum without seats, just rows and rows of poured cement,
each rising higher underneath the lights), the coaches
whom I heard each day as I was passing from the field house
to the track (their faces red and spitting chew in soda cans)
refer to players as the “running blacks” or “Negro boys.”
The only time I was alone with Timothy was in my senior year.
By then, I’d given up on running, given up on sports,
and focused everything I knew into escape. The threats
some parents used to motivate their children never worked
on me because the stories were not needed; everywhere
I looked I saw the cautionary tales—the quarterback
who’d gone division one, then, homesick, given up
his scholarship to enter in a local school before
(it sometimes happened quickly, sometimes not)
he withdrew all together, working in construction laying tile,
his wife (a former queen of homecoming or prom) perpetually
with child, her hair chopped short and sprayed, her bangs
unyielding to the wind, a baby canted on her hip.
At school, I volunteered for everything from mock trial
to debate, from chess club to (by far the worst of all)
the student government. And though I hated every day,
I never stopped, and springtime of my senior year, I found
myself backstage—a chorus member in the student musical
(my voice a cackling hen’s, so bad I often mouthed the words
as other members sang around me)—where, for five shows straight
(three evenings and two matinees), I stood for fifteen minutes
just offstage with Timothy between the second act and third.
He was the second lead (an office boss) and when he sang
his voice released onto the audience the way I’d seen
a flock of ravens startle from the branches of a tree and charge
at once into the air. The musical was nothing but a farce—
a young executive who climbs the corporate ladder
by his machinations and deceits (we fainted as a chorus
at the news of shortened coffee breaks; a buxom blonde—
her chest extended with a foam brazier—cooed loudly
for the leading man each time he hid beneath his desk).
Alone with Timothy, I could not look away from him.
He never sat, but stood beside the curtain, lights extending to him
so (although unseen by members of the audience) he was illuminated
in between the ropes and pulleys, rolling sets and counter weights.
I’d found a folding chair and waited out each show in darkness,
rising only for my two short scenes. He mouthed the words of all
the actors, sang each song beneath his breath. I did not say to him
how pleased I’d been a month before when both Elijah
and Vermaine were cuffed and taken from the school,
three officers descending on the lunchroom as the ropers,
punks and yuppies cheered (nobody knew the reason
for police although the rumor was a girl had told of an assault—
Elijah and Vermaine pursuing her into a bathroom after school).
I could have said most anything—a word of tenderness, a wave
or nod. Instead, I made myself a statue in the dark, no different
than the plywood sets around me or the busts and pillars
(stone of Styrofoam)—remains from other long-forgotten plays.
The sight of Timothy, on cue, his hands together at his waist,
releasing from the wings onto the stage, the sound his shoe heels
made when stepping on the boards, the vast obliteration of the lights,
became, for me, the image of a prisoner who strides onto the plank,
his form surrounded only by the sea, drawn swords and wind,
who even then won’t turn to curse, by name, his captors.
-originally printed in The Missouri Review
