I Am Not Sidney Poitier (7 page)

“Not Sidney Poitier. My name is Not Sidney Poitier.”

She appeared suddenly nervous, perhaps afraid, casting sidelong glances at her door and phone. “And you’re here because?”

“I’d like to report the inappropriate behavior of a teacher,” I said.

“Sexually inappropriate?”

“Yes. Of the oral variety.” I said this and looked away from her at one of the two big-eyed clown paintings on the wall behind her.

She appeared to be genuinely concerned. “Just where are you in school?”

“Decatur Normal.”

“And your principal is—”

“Mr. Clapper.”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“And the teacher in question?”

“My history teacher, Beatrice Hancock.” I took pleasure in saying her name, so I said it again. “Beatrice Hancock.”

“And what did she do?”

I decided to not beat around the bush, but dove straight into it, to offer the shock of it. “She drove me to her tacky house, got on her knee-socked knees, and gave me what I have since learned is called a blow job.”

“She did, did she?”

“And, to tell the truth, she wasn’t very good at it. I don’t think it’s supposed to hurt.”

She cleared her throat. “Well, never mind that. This happened once?” Dr. Gunther asked.

“No, twice.”

“I thought you said it hurt.”

“It did, both times,” I said.

“Why did you let it happen a second time?”

“She forced me.”

Dr. Gunther stared at me for a few seconds. “Did you tell Mr. Clapper that Miss Hancock did this to you?”

“I did. He laughed.”

“You don’t mind if I call him, do you?”

I shrugged. As she asked her secretary to get Clapper on the phone I realized what a bad idea it was for me to be there. This woman didn’t believe me and wasn’t going to believe me. I thought she might call security at any second and that I would then be just one twitch away from getting shot by a product of this very school system. She smiled, rather insincerely, at me while she waited, receiver pressed to her small gray head.

“Mr. Clapper? Yes, this is Superintendent Mrs. Dr. Gunther Junior down here in the central office. Oh, I’m fine. And how are you? And how is your wife? And how are your children? I’m sitting here in my office with a tall young black man. Do you have a student named Poitier? Really. So, that actually is his name.” Her sounds became absurd and muted, and then she was nothing but a working mouth in front of me, like a crab eating. I wanted to dash out of there, down the glass-and-steel corridors and into the street, but I didn’t. Then the sound of her voice came back and now it was laughter, cackling, witch-cackling laughter, which at once frightened me, irritated me, and justified all of my not-so-kind preconceptions. She hung up the phone, looked at me, and laughed harder.

As I walked out of the building and into the light spring air, I realized that I truly did not care, not even about the principle. I had no desire to see Miss Hancock punished and no notion to give her a piece of my mind. It of course helped me in not caring to remember that I was filthy rich. Grades and diplomas, perhaps sadly, simply didn’t matter to me. And as far as blond Beatrice Hancock was concerned, at least she had learned to suck a penis without drawing blood, and so I had performed a sort of public service, offering a measure of protection to the next in her line of victims. I was fairly clear in my desire to become a high school dropout. I decided right then to light out for the territory, as it were, to leave my childhood, to abandon what had become my home, my safety, and to discover myself. Most importantly I wanted to find my mother’s grave and put something fitting, perhaps beautiful, on her headstone. What? I’d yet to figure that out. The warm and humid spring air filled me with clean inspiration and a sense of independence.

And so, this became a prophetically, apocalyptically instructive, even sibylline, moment. I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

I was my own person, so I was told, so I believed, and so I was treated by Ted, and so I therefore had no reason to sneak away from my so-called home, to leave covertly in the night without a word. Instead, I found Ted sitting on his veranda, surrounded by flowers he once told me he never liked, reading the
Atlanta Journal-
Constitution
’s sports page while having breakfast.

“I don’t know why this is a continental breakfast,” he said, pushing a croissant with a finger.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“Well, the day had to come.” He bit into a cheese Danish and looked up at the sky as he chewed.

“I’m going to drive back to Los Angeles.”

“That seems like a likely destination. However, you don’t have a driver’s license,” he pointed out.

“I bought a fake one.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“It pays to have money,” I said.

He nodded and put down the Danish. “I’ve often wondered how the soldiers in the Civil War could do it,” he said. “Imagine, charging across a pasture with men getting blown to smithereens to the left and right of you and you keep going. What is a smithereen?”

“I bought a used Toyota. At least I think it’s a Toyota. At any rate, most of it is blue.”

“It must be, then, a Toyota. Well, you’ve got all my numbers and Podgy’s number and I assume some cash. Call Podgy and he’ll get you whatever you need, wherever you are. Call me if you need help.” He went back to reading his newspaper. “I don’t know why I bought that basketball team.”

“Good-bye, Ted.”

“Come back soon.”

I left Atlanta, the mansion, my so-called home, and Ted, recalling Ted’s words as I drove west on Interstate 20, then exited off the freeway and took US 278, looking for a road that was less road, possibly a more scenic route, “Once you leave Atlanta, you’re in Georgia.” And as I recalled his words, they came true. The troubling truth took the form of a flashing blue bubble atop a black-and-white county sheriff’s patrol car. I watched as the nine-foot-tall, large-headed, large-hatted, mirror-sunglassed manlike thing unfolded from his car, closed his door, and walked toward me—one hairy-knuckled suitcase of a hand resting on his insanely large and nasty-looking pistol, the knuckles of the other hand dragging along the ground. I had a thought to be terrified, and so I was.

He said to me through the completely rolled-down window of my yellow and mostly blue Toyota Corolla, “Hey, boy.” Those were his exact words, though I cannot capture adequately his inflection. It was not a greeting as much as a threat, somehow a question, certainly an attack. His dented badge said Officer George, and I found that funny.

“Officer,” I said as a greeting and as a question.

He took my greeting as a smart-ass remark, which it might have been, I don’t know. But I could tell from his depthless eyes that he didn’t like it. I imagined his eyes as blue lifeless marbles even though I couldn’t see them, hidden as they were behind his mirror lenses, but I assumed they matched the rest of his features. He said again, “Hey, boy.” More threatening this time.

“Sir?” I said.

“Okay, boy, first thangs first. Why don’t you let me see your license and registration?” But it was not a question.

I leaned over to reach into the glove compartment for my registration, which was as bogus as my license, and at that point I was startled by shouting, though I could not make out clearly what was being said. It sounded like, “That thar be far nuff, nigger! Sitch on back straight and git out the veehickle!” This was punctuated by the brandishing of his huge pistol. That I heard clearly.

“I was just reaching for … ” I tried to say.

“Y’all done heard me na, boy! Move na! Move yo black ass. Na, git out chere, raght na!”

My first thought was this man sounds like Jesse Jackson. My second thought was not to mention my first. I got out of the car, and he turned me around roughly and used his forearm to press me against the rear window. He slid me down the length of the car and leaned me over the short trunk, patted down my sides and the insides of my legs. He jerked my left arm behind my back, slapped on a cuff, then pulled back the right. “Don’t move, nigger!” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear another word outta yo mouth, you understand me?”

I said nothing.

“I said, do you understand me?!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shut up!”

His voice faded a bit as I imagined him backing toward his patrol car. I heard him on his radio. He said, “I need backup out here on 278 near the mill. Had a little trouble with an uppity nigger.”

Before I could whistle “Dixie” or any other tune there were three more black-and-white patrol cars and similarly brown-shirt-clad miscreants swinging their long arms around me. There was a lot of whooping and chattering and hoo-hahing and head scratching about whether my license was phony, about whether my car was stolen, it was just too clean, and about whether I was or was not that “actor feller.” A short very round one offered up the expert knowledge that “them thar movie cameras make you look older and fatter.” To this another said, “Then how many cameras on you, Cletus?” They had a big laugh. I didn’t laugh, leaning as I was still with my face against the trunk of the car.

Officer George brought his face close to mine. “Well, Poitier, I’m afraid you’re under arrest.”

“For what?” I asked.

“You hear that?” he asked his cohorts. “Did you hear that?” Then he got even closer to me, his breath smelling like something dead. “Well, fer one thang, sassin’ an officer of the law, which around here is the same as resistin’ arrest. Now, there’s speedin’ and failure to stop immediately when I turned on my light. And then there’s bein’ a nigger.”

“That’s not a crime,” I said, then realized just what I was saying. “I’m not a nigger.”

They laughed.

“This chere is Peckerwood County, boy,” George said. “And chere, you’s a nigger. And it’s a crime if’n I say it is.”

I was, to say the very least, terrified. To say the very most, in my mind, I was bending over as far as I could to kiss my ass good-bye. I was taken to the town of Peckerwood, the county seat of the county of the same name. I was denied my cliché one phone call, my car and belongings were taken to who knows where, and I was being called Sidney Poitier by the deputies and the jailer. They were encouraged to do so, pleased to do so, because of my insistence that my name was Not Sidney Poitier. Dressed in actual prison stripes that made me feel a little like Buster Keaton, I was arraigned by a judge who also had the surname George and shared all physical features with Officer George, save his size. The little snaggletoothed jurist pounded his gavel and said, “A year at the work farm!”

“Don’t I get a lawyer?” I asked.

“Two years!”

Evolution might have been glacial where they were concerned, but not with me. I kept my mouth shut after that. I considered attempting a bit of Fesmerization, but I was terribly afraid of the effects of ineffective staring.

The upside was that I was getting out of the town of Peckerwood, Georgia, though my impression of it was formed without a proper tour. The downside, and I mean down, was that I was getting out on a blue-and-white county bus bound for the Peckerwood County Correctional Prison Farm. The bus was at least thirty years old, smelled of urine and, oddly, carrots, and had caging on the inside of the windows. I was shackled to a slight white man, maybe twenty years old, with grease-slicked-back dishwater-blond hair, and from the way he stared at me I knew he liked neither me nor the fact that I was black nor the fact that we were chained together. If only I could have gotten to a phone I could have called Podgy, gotten some money, and probably bought my way out of this mess. Then it would have been back to Atlanta to hire a lawyer, and I would have wound up owning Peckerwood County. It occurred to me even then: Who would want to own Peckerwood County? The reason it was what it was was because there was absolutely nothing and no one there of any value. It was a terrestrial black hole, rather white hole, a kind of giant Caucasian anus that only sucked, yet smelled like a fart. We rolled through pine trees across spiderwebbed and cracked asphalt deeper into the county’s colon. We stopped finally at the farm. Shacks and more shacks, rows of dusty nothing, with many trees that managed to provide no shade at all. We filed out of the bus, twenty black and three white souls.

“What do they grow here?” I asked no one in particular, but for some stupid reason said it out loud.

“This here is a dirt farm, boy,” a mirrored-lens-covered set of eyes shouted at me. “Our dirt crop ain’t what it used to be and it never was!” That’s what I finally figured out he said. It sounded like, “Dis chere a dir farm, boi. Aw dir crop ain’t wha eah yoost to be, but den tit neber wa.” This would be how all the guards sounded all the time, and so I had no idea what they were telling me to do or not do.

They gave me a moth-eaten army-surplus blanket and a bar of soap and a tin cup and a quilt-thin mattress to put on the metal slab that was my bunk. The toilet was a hole in the middle of the aisle in the center of the shack. In other words, we were sleeping in a big outhouse. All of the men in my shack were black, as lost looking as I was, but finally not so much different from the rest of the inhabitants of Peckerwood County. The older men pushed me and insulted me, called me nigger, and forced me to the bunk nearest the toilet hole.

That first night I was awakened by a big white potato face looming over me. I of course had no idea what he was saying, at the top of his lungs, but it was clear that he wanted me to come with him. He took me out into the yard and handed me a shovel, opened his mouth, and let out, “Way dunt ye digs me a hole ri chere, boi?” But it wasn’t a question.

Since there was a shovel in my hands and ground beneath my feet, I assumed he wanted me to dig my own grave, so I started. The ground was rock hard, and the shovel didn’t make a dent.

“Put yer bac inter it!” he said.

I did, leaning onto the implement and scratching out a little stubborn earth at a time. I worked away; the tobacco-chewing Nazi stood over me while I became soaked with sweat and grief.

“Keep awn deegin’.”

It was so dark and still so hot. I was about two feet down into a sizeable ditch when another peckerwood joined us. He looked at me and said, “Why’n ye takin tha dir outta my hole, boi?”

“Because I was told to,” I said.

“Ja hear tha?” the second said to the first.

“Sho nuff.”

“You’n a uppty nig, aintcha?” the first said. “We’s awl gyine put y’all in da cain.”

“Ya, in da cain,” the second said, laughing a kind of panting-dog laugh. “We see haw he see thangs in the mornin’.”

I had no idea what they said, but I knew it couldn’t be good. They dragged me some yards away and stuck me all folded up into a four-by-four-foot corrugated-tin cube in the middle of the camp. I felt hot and sick in the dark and thought that I was about ready to die. I recalled all the prison movies I had seen, not many, and wondered if some good-hearted trustee or brave fellow prisoner would appear with a much-needed drink of water or a biscuit or a leathery scrap of dried meat. None did. However I was sure that the cliché shower scene was certainly on the program. I had the thought that things could not get any worse, and then I heard the thunder. It rained much of the night. With the heat and the humidity, the rain and the confinement, I felt hot and cold and parched and soaked.