When Dan was sent to The Experimental School, they told him he couldn’t play Malcolm X in the school play during Black History Month.
“Why not?”
The whole class burst out laughing.
“That’s enough!” Mrs. Castaneda told them all, and then explained, as gently as possible,” Because, Daniel… you’re not African-American?”
“What’s that?” Dan sat up interested.
“Black,” Mrs. Castaneda said, simply. “You’re not Black.”
“Yes, I am!” Dan insisted.
It had taken the arrival of his mother and his sister in the principal’s office to keep him from detention. He had repeated it over and over again until Mrs. Castaneda had asked him to leave and the class had laughed in his face. The white kids hated him. The Black kids couldn’t believe he’d try to be one of them, take something away from them. That’s what white folks always had to do! If no one could tell you were Black, then… why the hell try to be Black? Try to take away our month?
Daniel’s mother enrolled him in a new school.
Keisha was married by now. Dan loved his new family. His brother-in-law, their little baby, Mason. Whenever his sister placed Mason in Dan’s arms there was just a little twinge of envy.
“He’ll know what he is,” Dan told Keisha one day. Dan was about thirteen. “Look at me,” he stretched his arms out. “What am I?”
“You’re my brother. You’re Dan Mitchum.”
“You know how shit went at that school. When I was young and stupid. Younger and stupider.” He amended. “God, Keisha! Why aren’t we all the same? Why does it make a difference? Why do we have these different things. I mean, if we walk out on the street I’m white and you’re Black. It’s as simple as that. And legally we’re both black and… genetically we’re both Scots-Irish with a drop of African blood. The shit’s ridiculous. Who made up these rules?”
“Who says you have to follow them?” Sidney said, simply.
Dan looked up at him, surprised.
“You can be whatever you want. How do other Black people react to you? Sometimes?”
“If they know,” Dan confessed, “if they see Keisha or Mom or you then… they act like… I don’t want to be Black, like I’m trying to lie my way out of something. Like… But if I said I was Black, then I’d get laughed at for that too. And they act like… like I’m trying to get out of their world. Not all Black kids. I mean, I’m a Black kid. But certain ones. You know…”
“The ones who have their own lunch table in the cafeteria and their own section in the gymnasium for pep rallies?”
“Yes!” Dan shouted. “Is it everywhere? Do we do that everywhere?”
Keisha and Sidney looking at each other with the ghosts of smiles, nodded.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Sidney said. “Those same kids who won’t let you into their world, who sneer at you and call you names if they know what you are… There is something self hating in them. Envious. They’re angry that your skin is white because it means you can fade in, fade out and be whatever you want and no one will ever notice. You get all the privileges of a white life and still get to tell people how black you are. You’re sort of free. Maybe you’re tomorrow’s Black man and not today’s.”
“But I don’t want the color I am, or how much of what blood I am to matter—”
“And maybe that’s what tomorrow’s Black man is. Who knows?” Sidney went on. “But all those people who talk about you for what you can do, for not being in some sort of self imposed ghetto, for not living in a small world, paranoid, feeling a little less—”
“You know what they say?” Dan said angrily. “Sometimes they say…”
“You think you’re as good as a white person,” Sidney concluded tiredly.
“Yes!”
“Those people,” Sidney concluded, “who are so proud to be visibly Black, to have it pointed out where they go, to have their own tables and sections and clubs and live in isolation… they are so ashamed that part of them would give up an arm just to be you for a day.”
Dan thought on this for a while, and then he said, looking at the toddler, “Well then what about Mason?”
Sidney put a hand on his son’s head and said, “We’re Catholic, we live in Eastforth. With money. My best friends are Irish. My wife is mulatto. We’re outspoken, We do what we want to do. We don’t… we do not believe in borders.” He smiled down at the little boy who was playing with his fingers.
“I’m afraid Mason’s story is going to be a lot like yours…. Only browner.”
“WE HAVEN’T SEEN YOU IN a while,” Sully said, and by this he meant he hadn’t seen Balliol in a while.
Lincoln Balliol rubbed the bridge of his nose behind his glasses.
“My eyes hurt,” he said.
Sully came to sit by the bed and Balliol sat up.
“I’ve been learning the business. Mom and me. We’re at Dad’s old office all day just learning how stuff works and… I thought I’d be better. I guess I thought… ‘How hard can it be?’ Sort of like because I come from money I would just soak up this know how.”
“They call it business acumen.”
“Yes,” Balliol said. “They do? How’d you know that?”
“Well, I do have a brain.”
“I know you do,” Balliol said. “But you have a poetic brain and… where does business acumen come into your life?”
“Well, I have poetic acumen.”
I “Ah…” Balliol laughed, and Sully said: “Ah,” and then Balliol said “Ah,” They mimicked each other and, because they’d been friends for a long time they got a long series of laughs from doing this.
When they were finished chuckling, Balliol said: “How are things with Mr. Chris?”
“Good,” Sully nodded. “Really, good… like this morning—“
Balliol put up a hand. “Are you about to tell me something I don’t need to hear?”
“Do you need to hear about my sex life?”
“No.”
“Well,” Sully crossed his legs. “I guess there’s nothing to talk about.”
Balliol turned away and Sully laughed, “If you were white, you’d be blushing.”
“As it is, I’m just really hot. And not in the that good way.”
“So, are you finished with all of your research for the company?”
“Well, let me put it this way,” Balliol put his hand on the nightstand and reached for his cigarettes. “I’m finished going to that place everyday. Graduation was two weeks ago. Time to celebrate.”
“Are you going to school or are you and Mason still taking off? You know, like you’d planned?”
“I don’t know… I hadn’t planned anything. Where are you going? Aren’t we supposed to… Don’t kids plan this out junior year, and then come up with a good school and everything in March and start packing… well, two weeks ago?”
“Well, good kids do.”
“Like Jack Rapp,” Balliol murmured. He shook his head. “I can’t believe Jack Rapp’s sister is with Tommy.”
“I can’t believe Jack Rapp is gay,” Sully said. “Well,” he checked himself. “Yes I can.”
“I can’t believe he outed himself without outing himself.”
“I can’t believe,” Sullivan grabbed his best friend’s knee, “that he just got a girlfriend.”
“He—” Balliol stopped. “Get the fuck out. How Nineteen-Fifties!”
“I know!”
“Goddamn, I wonder if she knows. I wonder how miserable they’ll-”
Ruth Balliol came to the door, knocking lightly on the lentil.
“Mom?”
“Lincoln, you’ve got company.”
“Well, the more the merrier,” Balliol spreading his hands out, and Matt Mercurio entered the room.
“Mom, Matt. I want to know.: if you are gay, then you decide you’re going to get a girlfriend anyway… what does that make you?”
Matt cocked his head and said, “I’m the last person to answer that question.”
Balliol’s mother said, “It makes you British in the nineteen-twenties. Or American in the twenty-first century.”
She smiled, and then she was gone.
“Goodbye, Widow Balliol,” Matt purred and Balliol rapped him on the head.
“Hey, no gawking at my mother.”
“Your mother’s beautiful..”
“Yes, so am I. Gawk at me.”
Matt sat on the bed, vacantly gawking at Balliol, and then he said, “Is that enough.”
“More than enough.”
“Now,” Matt was wearing his book bag, which Balliol and Sully both thought was strange, and he pulled it off to reach for something.
“What’s this?” Balliol began, but Sully took it from him and said, “Genoa College.”
Matt shrugged, looking pleased at himself, though Balliol couldn’t tell why.
In front of a brick building happy young people with back packs were walking back and forth, sharing secrets, telling jokes. A girl sat on the lip of a water found eating a sandwich and Sully read, “Genoa College, a convenient commute between Columbus and Cartimandua…. Blah blah blah,” he opened it up and read quietly while Matt explained.
“I think I’m going to go. I sort of want to stay home,” he was telling them. “I think this will be a great place. I feel like I lost a part of myself last year. And I haven’t felt good. I mean, I didn’t feel good until I came back here. I don’t want to leave and I don’t want to go to Cartimandua College—”
At this, Sully looked up and made a gagging noise.
“Exactly,” Matt said. “This place seems like a perfect compromise. I think we could go down and look at it.”
“We?” Balliol said.
“Well, yeah,” Matt sounded mildly offended. “What would be so wrong with all of us going?”
“Like kids on a TV show?””
“Oh, Bailey, you gotta admit that’s kind of cool,” Sully told him.
Balliol opened his mouth to say something… something both of his friends assumed would be contrary, and then they saw the switch in his expression, and he said, “All right. Okay. You may have a point. Let’s go down and see this place.”
“Should we call the others?” Sully said.
“The others?” Balliol said. “Have all six off us going to this school?”
“Yeah.”
Balliol looked at both of them, and then shrugged.
“Why not?”