Heads of the Colored People(49)
If Eldwin cared about the white woman—and he might have at some level, but it wasn’t a visible level—he would have seen that she was now very interested in the conversation. His theory, he had told Brian before, involved learning to ignore the white gaze until it no longer came to mind. Then, “and only then,” he’d said, “black people can be free from all that double consciousness bull.” If he cared about the white gaze or returned it with his own, Eldwin would have seen the woman take out a little notebook with a pink cat on the cover.
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ELDWIN HAD ATTENDED a multiethnic charter school in Riverside and undergrad at Pomona College, where he supplemented his scholarship money with three part-time jobs. Grad school was paid for with a fellowship and teaching, and that gave him more time—or simply more opportunities—to practice being what Brian and others in his life described as smug.
His revised sketch read:
Me and Junior, see, hadn’t been friends to begin with, until he brought that soft yellow bread to lunch one day. When he brought potato bread to school, I was like, “What is that? Who eats that?” But once it hit my mouth—a little yellow heaven.
He brought 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 eat the dog food they dumped onto our Styrofoam plates. But she did it for him, and after I watched him take his little Tupperware container of Philadelphia cream cheese out of his bag and spread it over the hot bagels, I begged my mom to buy me some, too.
Then there were other breads, brioche, challah—maybe not challah—but raisin bread with the six or seven grains in it. Junior and I became fast friends, eating lunch together, playing basketball. But I drew the line when he wanted to start a “gourmet club” at school. He was back on that white folks stuff and maybe some gay stuff, too.
Eldwin felt the sketch sounded worse than before. He wasn’t sure anymore why he wanted to tell this story in the first place or if it was even possible to do ethnography without “being a Kim.” Didn’t every story provide a narrow representation at best and fetishize somebody at worst? He thought of his grandfather and his name, how a misspelling had formed his identity. And why had his mother let his grandfather dictate the birth certificate anyway, knowing he couldn’t read? Could no one in the hospital spell “Edward,” or was that just a story the family told?
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Brian returned from the stacks with two books and pushed one, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, across the table to Eldwin.
“Cute,” Eldwin said.
“You should really read it,” Brian said.
“I will as soon as you read Mumbo Jumbo,” Eldwin said, and they both laughed a little, though neither man thought the situation humorous.
Eldwin clasped his hands together and stretched his fingertips over and behind his head.
“Did you finish the assignment?” Brian tugged at the laptop from across the table.
Eldwin resisted, pulling it back. “It’s not ready.”
“You’ve almost got a full page now.”
“It’s not ready,” Eldwin repeated, and his face looked different, maybe sheepish. “Look, maybe you should tell this story yourself, and I’ll write something else, some other school story; you pick,” Eldwin said.
Brian shrugged. “Fine with me. You didn’t even have to read the Fanon book to get right.” He smiled.
The white woman, whose sweater was now draped over the back of her chair, looked flustered. She was taking notes but paused. She may have been an anthropologist, too.
WASH CLEAN THE BONES
Alma kept her eyes shut as she sang inside the church and later at the burial site. There was something about a closed casket that made her anxious, left too many gaps for her imagination to fill in. She tried to focus on her song. Thirteen. The boy was the same age as the number of bullet holes in his body, from head to torso.
The January wind whipped around her cheekbones but did not dry her sweat. She dabbed at her forehead with her silk scarf and caught her breath and sat in the white chair marked with her name. She did not feel her usual release at the pronunciation of “going up yonder,” nor did the deep guttural sounds purge her grief. This was her fifth funeral in two months. Watching the pallbearers place white roses onto the silver casket, she felt guilty, suddenly, that she should be paid for participating in this intimacy. She didn’t know this boy, though she knew three of the others she had sung for recently. Her fees kept her and baby Ralph outfitted in insulated winter coats, including the navy dress coat and matching beret she wore that day. Composed on the outside, inside she was falling apart. Her pelvis hurt; sweat dripped around the hairline of her best wig, and she couldn’t warm herself inside the church or out on the sunlit lawn near the hole where they placed the boy and his box with finality.
“You sang,” Bette, Alma’s coworker from the hospital, said, meeting her with baby Ralph near the last row of chairs. “It was a nice service, lovely florals. And you sang.”
The boy’s mother, Mrs. Madison, approached and gripped Alma’s hand silently, nodding approval before she departed with the rest of her family in the recessional line. She and her husband were in their early forties, and the boy was, or had been, their second-born son of four kids.