Heads of the Colored People(48)

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BRIAN WAS BORN in California, but he’d moved to Mississippi with his mother as a toddler, then back to the Inland Empire after his sophomore year of high school. He was tired of answering why, after living in California, he would ever consider moving back to Mississippi. People asked him more about that than his legs. He saw both states as home and liked the additional resources of SoCal, but he missed the smell of Yazoo City, his grandmother’s acres of walnut trees and blackberry bushes. He found “native” Californians smug and condescending, and he found their suggestion that their drought-prone home was better than everywhere else in the world vapid. Brian had started at UCLA, a beautiful campus with more prestige, but he had to leave the university, the entire county, because of a stalking incident involving an artist named Kim and the ongoing litigation thereof. UCR was a step below his original PhD program but the department was paying for his degree, and the campus was easier to navigate in a wheelchair, which he used on longer days instead of his trademark ebony cane; the commute from San Bernardino to Riverside, though ugly, was manageable.

“It’s not respectability anything,” Brian started. “There’s no real way for you to capture the regional differences without getting all stereotypical. Californians always think everybody else is less evolved, so no matter how conscious you think you are, you’re still reproducing that false superiority. It’s in the voice and”—he paused—“I don’t know how you would say it—the occasion for the story. Like why it’s being told in the first place. Like, why would you want to tell this story about a bunch of black Southern guys discovering bread anyway? What purpose does it serve unless it’s to show yourself as somehow better than them?”

“Because it’s a good story,” Eldwin said, “about cultural differences, intraracial differences, class differences. It’s more about how many different kinds of black people there are than it is about making everyone but Junior seem like a type.” He seemed proud of this explanation.

The men worked without speaking for several minutes, Eldwin returning to his computer and Brian fiddling with his book but not really reading.

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“You want it to seem that way.” Brian put the book down.

“What way?” Eldwin asked, still tapping at his keyboard.

“The whole regional and intraracial thing you said, but it’s like when my mom went to undergrad at USC. She had just moved here from Jackson, and she had this white roommate. She had dealt with white people before—her best friend in high school was one of the only white girls at the school—”

“So she was like an honorary black girl, then?”

“But my mom had never lived with any white people. And this roommate, Sandy, Mindy, something, was always trying to take pictures of my mom when she got out of the shower, when her hair was wet.”

“Was the roommate a lesbian? Your mom was a lesbian?” Eldwin was excited now.

Brian cut his eyes. “So she could catch her in her ‘natural state.’ The girl was sending the pictures home to her family, like, look at this elephant I saw at the watering hole or this native with a disc in her lip.”

“That’s messed up,” Eldwin said. “Was the roommate blond?”

“I don’t know.” Brian intensified his frown. “Probably not. But yeah, my mom threatened to fight her, and she brought a couple of her friends for backup, and the girl cried. Typical stuff. She never took another picture of my mom though, and I think she got transferred to another room second semester.”

The white woman across from them looked amused.

Eldwin typed something.

“Wait, are you writing this down?”

“I’m taking some notes, that’s all.”

“The point of the story,” Brian sighed, “is don’t be that woman. You’re acting just like her.”

“I get it,” Eldwin said, but he was still typing.

Brian sighed, dragging out the syllables of his irritation. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “You were okay with not writing about my ex, Kim, or my court case.”

“Right,” Eldwin said. “You asked me not to; anyway, I wouldn’t touch crazy Kim.”

“Why is that?” Brian said, wheeling himself back toward the table a little.

“It’s not my story, not open access. Didn’t Kim have some kind of fetish? Didn’t she treat you like fragile art?”

“Word,” Brian said. “If I were in disability studies, I could write a whole dissertation on her and disability as fetish and the importance of self-narrating and all that.”

“How is the stalking case going?” Eldwin said, finally looking up.

Brian shook his head and resettled his wheelchair at the table. “It’s going. Anyway, you understand the issue with my mom’s roommate and why my case isn’t your story to tell, but you can’t see how you’re being a Kim with this bread thing?”

Eldwin paused at “being a Kim.” His name was supposed to be Edward, the family lore held, but his illiterate grandfather botched the spelling on his birth certificate. He felt more like an Eldwin anyway. Brian didn’t know that story, and Eldwin wasn’t going to share it now.

“I’ll be back,” Brian said, leaving his stuff on the table and disappearing, after a moment, into the stacks.