Boaz Brown (8 page)

“Yeah, I said it. I know I’m a good man.”

“Who told you that you were a good man?” Momma put the pitcher of tea back into the refrigerator.

“Nobody had to tell me. I already knew that.” Daddy slapped Momma on her behind just as she lowered herself to the seat. “Jonathan Smith, you stop that!” she said as the corners of her lips turned up.

“How are things going at your job?” Momma asked me.
 

“Oh, the same.
 
Just handling problems with kids and teachers and parents.”
 
I shrugged.

“White folks?”
 
Daddy asked.

“All kinds of people, Daddy.”
 
As much as I respected my father’s position on race relations, he could be a bit overbearing. I did agree with him regarding the need for black people to learn to stick together before we undertake the task of becoming a part of America’s melting pot, but I picked my battles with him about exactly how the goal should be reached.

I don’t think jumping into the melting pot was on Daddy’s list of things-to-do-as-an- African-American-man. I didn’t foresee myself jumping in the pot, either. But I did want it for the future, maybe generations from now, after all of us who still had reservations died off. It might happen, I guessed, but not in his time.

He’d lived through everything I read about when I studied Martin Luther King, Jr., in school. And I figured there were enough white people who came of age in my father’s day to duly influence their offspring for
 
another two or three generations. Those like me—the first generation to be legally recognized as U.S. citizens with all rights and privileges therein—still had our doubts. We’d heard things from the horse’s mouth. And those we loved and trusted had taught us to be suspicious, careful, and viciously protective.

“You just keep your nose clean at that school, you hear?” Daddy pointed his fork at me.

“I always do,” I said in a monotone voice.

“All right”—he let his voice swing up—”you think you know everything. Can’t
 
nobody tell you nothing. Not that much has changed in forty years, you know.”

“I know that, Daddy.”

“What exactly is she supposed to be doing, Jon?” Momma asked.

“Just go to work, do your job, and come home. That’s exactly what I did for over thirty-five years with the United States Postal Service. Only problems I ever had with my work were with dogs. I know those higher-ups overlooked me for promotions because I was black, but they always wanted me there because I was a good worker.
 
Didn’t miss a day unless it was absolutely necessary.
 
Rain, shine, sleet, or snow.”

“Thanks for your hard work, Daddy,” I half-thanked, half-patronized him. I don’t think he could have withstood actual gratitude without throwing some kind of
 
de-sentimentalizing
 
twist on it. “I appreciate it, and so do the white people at my job.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he moaned, bringing a margarine-laced roll toward his mouth and taking a bite. “You think that’s funny. Just keep on
 
livin’. You
 
gonna
 
learn that white people don’t mean you any good.”

“Not a single one of ‘em, Daddy?”

“There’s always one or two, but you don’t have any way of
 
tellin’ which ones are really okay and which ones are just
 
tryin’ to stab you in the back or ease their minds about what they did in the past.
 
Just no way of
 
knowin’.
 
It’s best to just steer clear of ‘em. Keep to yourself and do your job.”

“Ooh, can we please talk about something other than white people?” I asked him. “You would think white
 
people
 
live
 
here as much as you talk about them.”

“I’m not talking about white people. I’m talking about
 
you.

“What about me, Daddy? I work with people of all different colors every day.” I was getting more and more irritated with his insinuation that I was selling out.

“And you like the whites just as much as the blacks?”

“When I deal with kids, it’s really not about color, you know?” I turned toward my mother, who might have been more receptive to my case.

“Kids grow up.” Daddy demanded my attention. “And I’ll
 
betcha
 
some of those same kids’ parents tell them not to listen to that old
 
black
 
vice principal.”

“Well, I don’t know if they do or not, Daddy.” I shook my head and continued eating.
 
Perhaps if I stuff my mouth, he
 
might
 
leave me alone.
 
Talking with Daddy about white people wasn’t like talking with Peaches and
 
Deniessa. We laughed, we joked, and we went on with our conversation. But with Daddy, it was serious. I’d realized very early on that he was consumed with race and discrimination and prejudice, as though these issues dictated every aspect of his life.

I ate, drank, and breathed race at 700
 
Dembo
 
Street. With that came a sense of pride and damnation all together. Grateful to be at a point in time where I could dream, but perhaps damned to a life of overexertion in my efforts to be all that my ancestors could not be. These privileges, these rights that many before me had bled and died for, came with such responsibilities.

With so much more at stake than my white counterparts, I was resentful.
 
Why do I have to put forth 110 percent while the white woman next to me gives maybe 75 percent? What makes her so special?
 
Looking at white people—particularly white women—and feeling that they thought the privileges of this country
 
belonged
 
to them set up a kind of grudge. Not intentional, I reasoned, but an inevitable byproduct of slavery.

Chapter 4

What’s your name?” I asked the new girl when we went out to recess.

“Patricia,
”
 
she
 
barely spoke. I watched her shift the dirt with her patent leather Buster Brown shoes. With her head down, I could see the zigzag part between her ponytails. I’d asked Momma to do that for me, but she never had the time.

She still hadn’t looked me in the eye. I noticed the way her legs bulged out of her socks just above the elastic. Then I thought of my own scrawny, chicken-looking legs. Mother Dear had said that I looked “po’.”

“Are you rich or
 
somethin’?” I asked her.

“No.” She finally looked at me. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, how come you got so much meat on your bones?”

“My momma said it’s ‘cause
 
my
 
tabulism
 
is so slow,” Patricia told me.

“How do you get your
 
tabulism
 
to slow down?” Maybe if I could slow mine down, Daddy would stop calling me “toothpick.”

“I don’t know. My momma said it’s from my daddy’s side of the family,” she said. Then she held her hands to her lips and whispered, “Sometimes I get up at night and sneak chocolate chip cookies.”

Okay, I did that, too, but it hadn’t helped me any. I was convinced she had to know more than she was confessing. “You want to swing together, Patricia?” I asked her.

“Sure.” Her cheeks almost pushed her eyelids closed as she smiled. “And you can call me Peaches.”

That happened
 
right
 
around the time our teacher, Mrs. Schumacher, divided our kindergarten class into two sections: the butterflies and the rainbows. It didn’t take long before we all figured out that the butterflies were “smarter” than the rainbows. Being a butterfly meant you used crayons less and wrote more often with big, round pencils. Butterflies read from certain books with the “real” teacher while rainbows assembled around the teacher’s assistant, being drilled over and over again on the letters of the alphabet. I couldn’t have explained how happy I was to have another brown face in the butterfly group. We quickly became inseparable.

* * * * *

I met Peaches for dinner on her side of the city. She picked a quaint, elegant little restaurant well known for its pricey but hard-to-find specialties. The clatter of silverware against plates and glasses attested to the upper-class atmosphere, putting us both on dialect alert as we waited to be seated.

My Boaz look-alike rushed in through the restaurant doors and accidentally knocked over my purse. “Oh, excuse me, sister,” he said, bending down to hand it to me.
 
Ooh, he called me ‘sister.’
 
I got that warm, familiar feeling inside that I wouldn’t have to start from square one with him.

“It’s okay.” His skin was likened unto Hershey’s with a smile that said, “I see my dentist regularly.” Granted, he was a bit clumsy. But he’d stopped in his hurried tracks to make it all better.
 
Can we get some violins here?
 

He nodded and smiled at Peaches and me, then rushed past us toward the waitress’s podium.

I hated moments like that—the ones that leave you thinking,
 
I should have said something,
 
days after the opportunity has passed.

“I see my party over there,” he said as he pointed to the bar. Then he waved. Peaches and I looked clear through the mini-garden and two other panes of glass to see his party. A black woman in a blue dress and blue pumps waved seductively in his direction.
 
So much for the violins.

“Girl, I could feel that in my bones. That was a
 
good
 
black man,” I said, shaking my head.

“A
 
taken
 
good black man,” she added.