Heads of the Colored People(47)
“I do know the assignment,” Brian said, rolling his eyes. He looked young for his age. Only the deep-set horizontal wrinkle bisecting his forehead gave his age away. “If you want to write about race and food and whatever you think black Mississippians didn’t have, I would say bagels. I feel like bagels were only in white neighborhoods.”
“Bagels are everywhere,” Eldwin said while his fingers worked the keys. “There’s nothing explicitly or exceptionally white about them now, if there ever was—maybe Jewish at some point. But, I mean, everyone eats bagels now, and they aren’t as sexy as croissants. Hold on a second.” Eldwin didn’t alter his volume when he said the words “white” or “Jewish.” He typed for another minute or so. He was two shades lighter than Brian, but also believed himself two shades blacker, as far as those things can be measured. “How’s this?”
Junior was always trying out white folks stuff and bringing it to school for us to try with him. He wasn’t built for Jackson, Mississippi. There were things black people just weren’t supposed to do, like get caught on the wrong side of County Line Road after dark or use the word “persnickety,” and Junior did both of those things, among others.
When he brought potato bread to school for lunch, we were all like, what’s up with the yellow bread? Dumbest thing we ever heard of until we tasted it. Once that yellow soft hit our mouths, it was like Apple Jacks; it didn’t even have to taste like apple, or potato.
Bagels, too, shined up like soft pretzels. He actually asked the lunch lady, Ms. Martin, to toast them for him behind the counter, like we could do more than line up and eat the wet dog food they slopped onto our Styrofoam plates. But she did it for him, and we watched him take his little Tupperware container of Philadelphia cream cheese out of his bag and spread it over the hot bagels, and we pretended not to want a pinch so we wouldn’t look like we were begging for somebody else’s food.
But most of us drew the line at brioche.
Brian closed his eyes after he finished reading and pushed his wheelchair back a few inches from the table. “What exactly is ‘yellow soft’? It sounds contrived, like you’re trying too hard to sound country. No one would have said that, and on second reading I don’t like the way you’re representing the school.”
“What’s wrong with the school?” Eldwin said, scanning his work.
“It sounds like a prison-industrial complex.”
Eldwin tugged at his unkempt goatee, twirling the coils into a severe point. He was the kind of guy who thought the gesture made him look smarter and that the goatee made him look older.
“It kind of was a prison-industrial complex,” he started. “All those kinds of public schools are, and the private ones are part of the system in their own way.” Eldwin was also the kind of guy who said “the system” often.
“I get that,” Brian said, looking back at the white lady, who did not seem especially interested in the conversation, but who responded to Brian’s attention by slumping farther into her book. “But I don’t like the way it sounds when you write it,” he said, smoothing his black polo shirt. He never wore blue or red, a phobia he’d picked up as a young child watching movies about Compton.
“How would you put it, then?” Eldwin said without looking up.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I would use the royal ‘we.’ I’d do more to try to distinguish the narrator from the other characters so it’s not like they’re some kind of monolith.” Brian looked back at the white lady, and indeed she looked impressed by his use of the word “monolith.”
They were both grad students in the Department of Anthropology at UC Riverside, occupying an atypical—almost magical—cohort that happened to include two black men. Their assignment required a combination of face-to-face interviewing and casual conversation, the field notes from which would form the sketches. It was Eldwin’s turn to talk to Brian. They had agreed to write about Brian’s time in Jackson—his current court case and disability were off-limits, Brian made clear—but Eldwin wasn’t interested in either anyway; he wanted to pursue a story that Brian had told him months before, about a kid who brought potato bread to school. It was also Eldwin’s idea—against the conventions of the assignment—to use first-person plural.
“I’m not writing about all black folks, or even all black people in Jackson,” Eldwin said. “I’m representing a specific group, this ‘we,’ and I’m not trying to make that we an ‘everyone.’?”
“But in choosing the plural and the first-person plural you’re basically allowing that ‘we’ to work as an ‘everyone.’?” Brian looked back at the woman and rotated his chair an inch away from the table, then back and away again.
Although both men felt like unicorns in their grad program, Brian had the most trouble with his horn, adjusting it nervously. He never apologized for his body; he was more self-conscious about his black maleness than his disability, though he felt at times that his cane, the wheelchair, and the contusions on his legs gave him a streak of rainbow hair to accompany the horn.
“You’re on some respectability mess,” Eldwin said without raising his voice, with the same tone he might use to say, “There’s ketchup on your shirt.” “It sounds like you’re not as concerned with protecting black Southerners as you are with white people reading this and then making assumptions about black Southerners.”