My Monticello(3)
Like you, I played baseball, if briefly. The summer I turned ten I joined the Negro Youth League. I went for the promised uniforms, which turned out to be sweat-stained cast-offs salvaged from a white church’s collection. Even so, thick patches had been sewn onto the chests, and underneath mine, my heart felt sanctioned. Our very first practice, I managed a decent hit, a satisfying thwack like an ax cleaving wood. Afterward, I should have walked back with the others, but instead I set off on my own, replaying my minuscule victory in my head until it felt epic and novel-worthy. I wandered down behind White Knoll, crossing Main, still dreaming. I didn’t realize where I was until I heard car doors slap shut behind me, felt the chilled shadows of strangers. Three young white men had gathered around me, their bodies blocking each path of escape I darted toward. “Where does this boy believe he’s going?” the one in the work boots said.
As they knocked and beat me to the ground, I couldn’t help but think of a boy we all knew of—Tully Jones—whose body had been found some summer before, floating in the river, his head bashed in. When these men finish killing me, they’ll drag my body down to the water too, I remember thinking. Please, don’t hold me down under that murky water—I can’t even swim! Why hadn’t I learned to swim? And how would Mother even find my body? What if she thought I’d run off too, like my father had? Up close, the men reeked of peach brandy, the kind my schoolmates’ fathers would nurse Friday nights under the sycamores. When those men finished doing what they did to me, I lay chest and cheek in the sand, playing dead, as they staggered back to their car, breathless. Even after they pulled off, sending up a sharp spray of gravel over my body, I kept on playing dead, as if I were sunk down under that endless water, my skin a wrinkled softness that would soon scrape away or be eaten by crawfish, by those microscopic creatures that troubled the silted bottom, until no one could tell or else it didn’t matter what color I was.
The following fall, Mother insisted I attend a private boarding school, miles out of town. I wasn’t to live in the dormitory with the others. Instead, I woke before sunrise, walked out to the highway, and caught a ride with a deacon from our church, an elderly man who smelled of polishing oil. He was the boarding school’s custodian and the only other brown face to grace those halls besides mine. During the school day, we never looked at each other. I was always aware when he was in the same room, but I never let my eyes rest on his, not until we were far away from that place, and even then it was with a kind of shame.
The school’s headmaster—the man who had agreed to my admittance—had gone “up north” for some number of years. His surname was the name of the school, and everyone knew it was his family’s money that kept that dying boarding school from going under. At school assemblies, this headmaster would find excuses to parade me across the stage—my improbably strong elocution, the sharp crease in my uniform—defiant or oblivious to the contempt my visibility inspired. Even the dimmest boys were clever in their cruelty. Mother had been hired to cook and clean at the headmaster’s residence in town, and for this, the others mocked her mercilessly. What could I do, it was true—my scholarship was her bowed back, her bleach-bitten hands. Enrolling me there must have been an act of faith or desperation, like pressing a message into a bottle and floating it onto turbulent waters.
Even so, I clung to my formal education, setting off at seventeen to a small all-Black college, then going far north for graduate school. The boys I’d grown up with mostly stayed rooted. They married girls from church, worked hard to scrape together a living or get ahead. Some were shipped off to Vietnam; a few marched in bigger towns, facing police dogs and fire hoses. I devoted my life to scholarly truth, spending the majority of my adult life here at this esteemed institution. After you were born, I purchased my own home, just a two-bedroom bungalow, but in a good neighborhood not far from campus. I can walk to work, and sometimes I do. Whenever I walk my mind wanders. Occasionally I worry that I’ve been self-indulgent in my research, somehow selfish in my secret fatherhood. Walking, I think the world is surely a better place now than it used to be for people of color. Aren’t I myself living proof against my theories? Can’t I be satisfied?
But then, like current, I’ll feel it again, even now. It might be the guard at the campus market who follows me when I walk in to buy a carton of milk for my tea. Or a pair of young mothers who push their strollers widely around me on the great lawn. Mostly it’s a growing unease about my career. Yes, I was hired. Yes, I’ve managed to keep my head above water, but in these final years, they’ve burdened me with the lowliest committee assignments, filled my schedule with 100-level classes, as if I were an adjunct. Of course, this might be a reflection of some defect in my performance—a failure to publish as well as some colleague down the hall, my secret research obscuring my official work. But how can I know for sure? How does anyone know if they are getting more or less than they deserve? All I know for certain is that, last September, a police car trailed me when I was walking home one brisk evening. Me, Professor Cornelius Adams, in my sixties, in my overcoat and loafers, my briefcase clutched beneath my arm. As you well know, cruisers often patrol the edges of campus, quieting fraternity parties, corralling drunken freshmen back onto grounds. They only pulsed their lights at me. When I turned, the one on the passenger side—a Black officer—shouted from his window. Where was I going, he wanted to know. Before I could gather words to answer, a more urgent call must have come in. They turned on lights and sirens in earnest and sped away.