All American Boys (13 page)

Only about five minutes into it, though, Molly leaned over and asked EJ if he'd been to Jill's party. Before he even had time to answer, Ms. Webber looked up from the pile of papers she was grading and pointed to EJ.

“Every time, EJ,” she said abruptly, so loud that she seemed to surprise even herself.

“What?” he asked.

“You.” Ms. Webber's eyes narrowed and she spoke calmly, maybe too calmly. “Every time I look up and see something going on, some distraction. There you are. Right at the center of it. Do you need to take your test out in the hall?”

“Guilty until proven innocent, huh?” He hesitated, but not for long. Nobody likes to be spoken to like he's a damn child, least of all EJ, and he wasn't the kind of kid to stay quiet. He didn't miss a beat. “Just like Rashad.”

I swear I could hear Ms. Webber suck in her breath as she tried to figure out how to answer.

It was awkward for all of us. Especially because EJ was black, just like Rashad, and Ms. Webber was white, just like Paul—like me and like Molly, too. I think EJ was hoping someone else would pipe up, but none of us did, not the white kids, nor any of the kids of color. We all just left him hanging out there until finally Ms. Webber found something she wanted to say.

“That's not— It's not— You just can't go conflating things like that.” Then she pointed to the copy of the test she had in front of her. “This is for your benefit,” she squeaked. “We don't have time to talk about this right now.” She took another breath. “I'm sorry. I know there's a student from our school who is in the hospital today, but we don't have the full story. What I do know is that if we are going to be ready for these
exams, we have to get down to business today. They won't wait for us. We have to be ready.”

“Rashad,” Molly said.

“What?” Ms. Webber said.

EJ looked at her, surprised.

“Rashad,” Molly said louder. “That's his name. Rashad's in the hospital.”

“I know that,” Ms. Webber said.

“Yeah, well,
that student
in the hospital isn't here to take any practice tests today because he's, you know, beaten to hell,” EJ said.

“Rashad,” Molly said again.

EJ smiled. “Rashad,” he said louder.

They both said the name again and looked around for others to join them, but the rest of us sat there in shock.

“All right, both of you, outside now!” Ms. Webber yelled. She was flushed straight down to the base of her neck. She stood up and walked EJ and Molly to the hall, and as they left they kept saying “Rashad, Rashad,” until I couldn't hear them anymore.

And before Ms. Webber came back in, someone in the back whispered, “Paul Galluzzo.”

The other damn name that was all over the news. I turned around to see who it was, but everyone had his or her head down. I was pretty sure it'd been a guy, and I found myself
looking at Rahkim and Malcolm and realized I was looking at the only two other black guys in class. I was pissed. I was pissed someone had said it, because I was sure they said it so I would hear, and I was pissed I was taking it to heart, and I was pissed I'd just done the same goddamn thing and had assumed it had been Rahkim or Malcolm, but I was pissed that I was pissed, because I was also pretty sure it had been one of them.

And mostly I was pissed because I just wanted everyone to shut up about it. Didn't talking about it just make it worse for all of us? Did everything have to be about Paul and Rashad?

I was still pissed after school when I got to the locker room, changed, and headed out to the court. Guys were already shooting and warming up. I stretched and bounced up and down on the sidelines, keeping to myself. That wasn't new. I like to avoid the early shoot-around, the chaos of just throwing the ball up and having it bounce out because someone else's shot smacked it away. I liked to find my rhythm on my own. I got loose with a ball and worked on my handling, sprinting up and down the sidelines with shadow fake-outs, keeping the legs loose as I popped a zigzag pattern back and forth, working the day out, so I could just concentrate on basketball.

Easier said than done, though. I couldn't get my head in the zone—and found myself keeping an eye on English
and Shannon Pushcart, and I knew exactly why—they were tight with Rashad. I watched English spin circles around Tooms, moving so quickly he could have been on skates on ice. Shannon, Nam, Dwyer, and Guzzo and most of the rest of the team chased loose balls that bounced off the rim like popcorn. Nobody else seemed pissed off, though. Was I the only one looking out at every goddamn interaction on the court through the filter of Rashad and Paul? I didn't think so.

Coach gathered us at the bleachers, and the fifteen of us stacked up side by side in the first three tiers, as if we were having our photo taken. He paced back and forth as he gave us a speech about how everybody was saying it was our year, the newspapers, people in the league, even TV sports news was covering us. But who was he kidding? He was going crazy about it too.

“Now I know what you're thinking, boys, you're thinking about the scouts,” Coach now said. “Who is coming when? When's that guy from UNC coming, right, English? Or is it Georgetown?” He bent toward him and grinned.

English glanced up at Coach and nodded.

“But you got to block out the bullshit,” Coach said, choosing English again, this time pointing at him. Then he stood up and continued to pace. “If all you think about are the scouts, all you think about is yourself. Then we don't win. Then nobody wins.” He paused. “You listening?” he barked.

“Yes, Coach,” we grumbled back, but he just kept on talking, not waiting for our answer.

“Every day is the same day. We are one team, and we stop the other team from getting easy shots, and we work them hard as hell on the other end so they give
us
the easy shots. We do that as one team and we do that every day. You hear me?”

“Yes,” we said.

“I said
you hear me
?”

“Yes!” We all shouted now.

“You hear me?” he boomed.

“YES!”

“Bring it in.”

We jumped out of our seats and circled him, dropping our hands into the pile.

“TEAM on three.
One, two, three
.”

“TEAM!”

“That's right, bring it back in here.” We were all bouncing and swaying, loose bodies with blood on fire. We got our hands back in the pile.

“Media shit's gonna hound us every day. You let me handle that. You just ignore that shit. There's all kinds of pressure going on out there, at school, in your lives back home. You leave it all at the door of this gym. In this gym we're only Falcons, you hear me?”

“YES!”

“Pack it in closer!”

We did as we were told.

“You tell me whose house this is.”

“Our house!”

“Who are we?”

“FALCONS!”

“Who?”

“FALCONS!”

“Who?”

“FALCONS!”

“Team on three.
One, two, three!
”

“TEAM!”

That is what I wanted to believe too. I'd walked onto the court and seen the team like this: seven black guys, five white guys, two Latino guys, and one Vietnamese guy. But now, after Coach's rally, after we got into three lines and began the weave together, passing and running, passing and running, five balls whipping through the air between all this, dodging in and away from each other, fifteen guys moving like the connected parts of one heavy-breathing animal, I thought that maybe leaving all the shit behind at the door wasn't such bad advice. And hell, it wasn't my problem, really, right? Couldn't I leave it at the door wherever I went? Maybe we all should have tried to do that. It wasn't any of our problem. It
was a problem of the law, and the law would work it out—isn't that what it was for, for God's sake? To take care of us?

And as I hustled to the sidelines and jumped into a full minute of foot fire, shouting the countdown from sixty with Coach, I kept wondering: Wouldn't we have been better off thinking that way?
All of us.
What did we really gain by talking about this—Paul, Rashad, what happened—digging it up and making everyone feel like shit?

Maybe for this one practice we were all thinking only about the team: one unit, one thing, no parts, one whole, no problems, just one goal for one team, none of us thinking about race or racism, all of us color-blind and committed like evangelicals to the word “team,” just like Coach wanted.

Maybe. But I doubted it. That's what I
wanted
to think, but it wasn't what was in my mind or gut. Instead I knew there was a problem, and I was beginning to think I was a part of it—whether I was in the damn video or not.

T
here's this dude named Aaron Douglas. Scratch that. There
was
this dude named Aaron Douglas. A painter in the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Mrs. Caperdeen, my art teacher freshman year, turned me on to him during a lesson about artists from that period. Now, I had already been into art, way before Mrs. Caperdeen's class. I've been drawing since I was like five or six. It came from hanging out with my dad after church on Sundays. Well, Spoony and Ma would be there too, but for some reason, when I think back on it, it always seemed like it was just me and Dad, probably because we had our own thing. Our own after-church tradition. He would drive the whole family to this diner downtown. Ma would order the eggs and English muffin, Spoony always got the French toast, and me and
Dad both got pancakes. Then Spoony and Ma would go back and forth trading corny jokes, which I was usually all about, except on Sundays. Sundays was when I butted out and let the two of them have their dry humor because me and Dad, we had pancakes, coffee (hot chocolate for me), and the newspaper.

Dad, of course, would be
really
reading the newspaper. Politics, current events, sports, every single story. But he'd pull the comics section out and hand it to me. As I'm sure you can tell by now, my old man doesn't do funny all that well. But me, I loved the comics. All of them. But there was one in particular that struck me more than the others, and the funny thing is, I'm not really sure why. It definitely wasn't the funniest one. As a matter of fact, most times it wasn't funny at all. Not to me, at least. It was called
The Family Circus.
A brilliant name for a comic strip, even though the family in the comic wasn't much like a circus. They were pretty normal. And the strip wasn't really a “strip.” It was just one image. One scene. Not like the others, which were made up of a whole bunch of different boxes, each one telling more of the story. I know you know what I mean. Everybody knows what comic strips look like. But this one,
The Family Circus
, was just one picture, in a circle. Not even in a box like normal comics. And it was all about this normal white family. Four kids, two parents, and a grandma. And nothing ever
seemed to be happening. Like I remember this one, where the oldest son, Billy, and his younger siblings are watching their grandmother talk on the phone, and it just said,
Grandma's phone is really old-fashioned.
That's it. See? No punch line. Not funny, and if anything, it's actually pretty lame. But maybe that's why I liked them. Maybe I was fascinated by the fact that it seemed like white families, at least in comics, lived simple, easy lives. That, and also the images—I loved them.
Loved
them. And every Sunday after church I would tear
The Family Circus
out to save.

By the time I got to Mrs. Caperdeen's class, and by the time she taught the lesson about Aaron Douglas, I had collected like a thousand
Family Circus
clips. I stored them all in a shoe box under my bed and would go through them sometimes, just to pick one out to copy-sketch. And after a while, I got better at drawing and started making my own family cartoons in the same style. I called them
The Real Family Circus,
and most of them featured a cartoon version of my father shouting at a cartoon version of my brother. But when I saw Mr. Douglas's work, well,
The Family Circus
kinda went out the window. Aaron Douglas was doing a different thing, on a whole other level.

Let me describe what his work looks like. Imagine
The Lion King
. But all the lions are people. Black people. So Simba and Mufasa, are, let's say, a black king and a prince. Now,
imagine that you're looking at them through the thickest fog ever. So thick that you can't make out any actually feature on their bodies, but you can still see their silhouettes. So it could be any king. Or any prince. But you can still tell they're black. That's Aaron Douglas's work. And the first time Mrs. Caperdeen showed us a slide from his series
Aspects of Negro Life,
I knew the kind of art I wanted to start making.