Call Me by My Name

  For Kim and Hannah

  The distance was to blame. It made him hard to categorize. “Is that one of them Redbones?” Curly Trussell asked, reaching for a bat just in case.

  I lowered my mitt and strained for a better look. The kid was about a hundred yards away, moving past the pool and the pool house and the snowball stand, where “She Loves You” was playing over speakers attached to the roof. Then he crossed Market Street and entered the old shell road that ran between the tennis courts and the civic center. He was heading straight for us now, arms pumping, steps keeping time to the music. The way he carried himself, you had to wonder if he thought he was welcome. A splash of sunlight fell from the trees and caught him just right, and I could hear gasps from some of the guys. We’d all seen maids in South City Park before, and a few old trusties from the jailhouse pushing mowers and pulling weeds, but except for them, black people weren’t permitted. They couldn’t ride bikes or drive their cars through the park, let alone play ball there. The town had a place for them.

  It was May of 1965, and school had just let out for the summer. There were hundreds of us scattered over three fields waiting for tryouts to begin. Until this moment I’d been loosening up with the other Pony League kids—playing catch, swinging a bat with a doughnut on the barrel, and running sprints in the weeds.

  “Look at him, Curly!” Freddie Sanders yelled. “Look close. That’s a full-blown colored if I ever saw one.”

  Then a bunch of them ran to the road and grabbed shell to throw.

  I couldn’t see how the kid posed much of a threat. He was on the lean side, with an overall construction so rickety you wondered if he even ate. Give him a different skin color and he could’ve been one of us—just another kid with dreams of glory in his head. His striped tube socks climbed up to his kneecaps and his black All-Stars had holes punched in the fabric. A short-fingered infielders glove hung from his belt and shone with a fresh coat of linseed oil, and the rest of his clothes—the gray T-shirt tucked into jean shorts, the faded feed-store cap—might’ve come from my own closet.

  He was showing no fear that I could make out, and maybe that added to why they had such a problem with him. “Let’s get him!” Curly shouted. “Let’s make him pay.” And now the shell started to fly.

  It couldn’t have hurt much because it was mostly powdery chips and pieces, but it was enough to drop him to the ground. He curled up in a defensive posture, arms wrapped around his head, legs wheeling, as if he were riding a bike. Everybody laughed at how scared he looked, including some of the adults. These were the players’ fathers who’d volunteered to coach the teams.

  “Hey, boy, nobody wants you here,” one man called out.

  “What is wrong with you, little brother?” said another. “You wake up this morning hankering for a beating?”

  Then Curly let out a war cry and went hauling off in the kid’s direction. He stood over him with the bat held high above his head, hands wrapped around the handle. He looked like somebody with an ax about to chop some wood, only today the wood was the kid’s head. I figured he was probably just trying to scare him, but I also knew that it wasn’t wise to take chances with a person like Curly, and so I decided to do something. I ran up to him and caught him square in the back first with a shoulder and then with a forearm. Both Curly and the bat went sailing in the weeds.

  The shell kept falling and the kid kept bawling. And finally I covered his body with mine.

  He was scrawny in my arms, like sticks in a sack, and his breath smelled of toothpaste, the cinnamon kind. That he was a skeleton who brushed his teeth made me feel even sorrier for him. “Don’t you know the rules?” I asked him.

  “What rules?”

  “You’re in the wrong park. They don’t let Negroes in here.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  I couldn’t answer that so I let it pass without trying to.

  We waited until the shell stopped coming. I got up and brushed myself off, then I lifted him to his feet and dusted him off too. I put his cap back on. Then I pointed to where we should go and started walking with him there. We went past the pool and down a path in the woods that wound to the bayou that formed the park’s western border. “You’ll be fine once you make it to Railroad Avenue,” I told him.

  A pedestrian bridge crossed the bayou to the other side. He got about halfway across and turned around. “I just wanted to play some ball,” he said.

  “Not here you can’t,” I said. And already I was trying to understand what I’d done, the risk I’d taken. I’d have to explain myself when I got back to the Pony League field. I’d have to argue that I still was as white as everybody else.

  And what would I tell Pops if he found out?

  The kid stopped again on the other side of the bridge, and this time he cupped his mouth with his hands. “My name is Tater Henry,” he said.

  “Rodney Boulet,” I answered, saying it the old French way: Boo-lay.

  I watched him take a dirt trail that cut between large ranch-style houses. These were houses where white people lived, which meant the trail was for whites only.

  Tater was up near the street when a man appeared and stood in his yard yelling. He was yelling the usual things you heard when a black person turned up where he wasn’t supposed to be and you had to put him in his place.

  Tater lifted an arm and waved as if he and the man were old friends, then he kept on his way.

  I was with Angie when I saw him again a few weeks later. He was raking out clumps of grass clippings in front of one of the old mansions on Court Street. I could hear a mower coming from the back lawn. The side gate in the iron fence was open and you could see a black man through it, his bald head shining with sweat as he cut rows running parallel with the fence and the street.

  Angie and I were on our bikes heading toward downtown and J. W. Low to pick up something for Mama. I slowed and wheeled back around. “How you been, Tater?”

  He kept working. He didn’t say anything.

  “Did you go out for baseball at the black park?” I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “How come?”

  “You can’t see? I got me this job instead.”

  I watched him a while. He had his cap turned around on his head, and his long socks had fallen down to his ankles. He looked to be about my age, which was ten going on eleven. He might’ve had the skinniest calves I’d ever seen. His skin was darker than I remembered. “Is your name really Tater?”

  “Tatum.”

  “Tatum? So Tater’s your nickname?”

  He nodded and picked up the pace with his rake. After a minute he turned his back to me. “I’m sorry, but I need to work.” And he glanced over at the gate.

  “See you.”

  “See you too, Rodney.”

  I caught up with Angie at the dime store. She was in the sewing-needs section, digging around for a certain kind of ribbon that Mama wanted. “He’s the only black person you’ve ever talked to, isn’t he?” she said.

  I didn’t have to think long. “Yes, he is.”

  “Did it make you feel tingly all over?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said and then laughed.

  “Have you ever talked to a black person?” I asked.

  “All the time.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. I ain’t scared.”

  I knew it was a lie. “Pops would kill you,” I said.

  “Not if he didn’t find out,” she said, which was true, of course. He couldn’t kill her as long as it remained a secret.

&nb
sp; Then that winter we ran into Tater again. The lawnmower repairman also bought pecans, and Pops took Angie and me there to sell the ones we’d picked at our grandparents’ farm. Tater was inside the small metal building with a sack of his own. He didn’t have many. He’d wheeled them over in a toy wagon with rust-eaten holes in the bed and in the words RADIO FLYER on the sides.

  He looked at me, and then he looked at Angie, but he seemed to know better than to look at Pops. I would’ve talked to him had Angie and I been alone. In a minute he was gone, the empty wagon clattering behind him.

  “You pay the blacks the same amount per pound you pay the whites?” Pops asked the man who was doing the weighing.

  “Same price.”

  “Now that ain’t right,” Pops said.

  The man shrugged. “A pecan is a pecan.”

  “The hell it is,” Pops told him.

  Pops was like that—ornery, and always wondering why he had to be the one to come up short when everybody else was getting more. Now the man was telling him that black pecans were no different than white pecans. I could see Pops’s face flame red and the veins in his neck puff up. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” he said.

  The man didn’t have to ask him about what. Instead he reached into Tater’s pile and came out with a single pecan, then he removed a second pecan from our bag laying on the scales. He held his hand out, one pecan next to the other in his palm. They looked identical to me.

  “That one’s ours,” Pops said.

  The man was slow to smile. “Be reasonable,” he said.

  “I’m telling you, that’s the white pecan.”

  The man tossed the pecan Pops had chosen into Tater’s pile, and then he dropped the other one into ours. The man hadn’t paid Pops our money yet, but that didn’t stop Pops from lunging at him. A table stood between them, and Pops nearly knocked it over trying to get at him. Pecans spilled to the floor and puddled at our feet.

  “Get out,” the man said.

  “Six bucks,” Pops said, and stuck his hand out.

  The man removed a wad of cash from his pocket and threw a couple of bills at Pops. “Get out,” he said again.

  On the drive home we sat side by side in the cab of his truck, an old Chevy Cameo. In our haste to leave, our usual seating arrangement had been confused, and now I was stuck between him and Angie. I could feel the heat coming off his body, see the sweat like dew drops in the hair of his forearms.

  “I don’t like the way the wind is blowing,” he said when we were halfway home. I leaned forward and looked off at the trees even though I knew he was talking about Tater’s pecans.

  The next time we saw Tater was at the Delta, the movie house in town. He was waiting in line at the colored entrance. He was wearing nice clothes—church clothes, probably—and there was a lady with him. She kept her hands on his shoulders.

  Then again in somebody else’s yard, weeding a flower garden. Then standing at the colored window at the Shrimp Boat, waiting for a dinner order. Then out in front of the Coke plant, watching a white man on a forklift load crates on a truck.

  Time went by, years went by, and I kept seeing him everywhere—this kid I’d never noticed before; the kind I wouldn’t let myself notice until that day he showed up in our park. How does somebody go from being invisible to being everywhere you look? How is he suddenly there when he didn’t exist before?

  He wasn’t a friend yet, but he was familiar and we always acknowledged each other. Most times he just touched the bill of his cap, but on occasion he’d wave. Then he started calling out my name and I started calling out his. And eventually he even felt safe enough to call out Angie’s.

  He waited four years before coming back out for baseball. It was 1969 now, and he came up the same route as before, walking past the pool and the pool house and the snowball stand, crossing Market Street, and then entering the old shell road half-dancing to whatever music was playing. My age group had graduated to the Babe Ruth League, and once again we were waiting for tryouts to start. Unlike before, nobody threw shell at him. Instead they all stood together and stared, and they really let him have it with their mouths.

  “Hey, boy, you get lost on your way to the projects?” one of the coaches yelled.

  “What’s wrong, my man?” another of the dads shouted. “Haven’t you heard what happened to that preacher in Memphis?” That was Martin Luther King Jr., murdered the year before.

  Tater just kept coming. When he got closer and it started to look like Curly might go at him again, I stepped out a ways to make sure there weren’t any problems. Puberty had found me the year before, and I was already six-foot-two and two hundred and thirty-five pounds. I was what Mama called “husky,” and when we shopped for my clothes we had to drive an hour to Baton Rouge to find a specialty store for the big and tall. The one good thing about being so large was that nobody messed with me—ever.

  “Good to see you, Tater,” I told him.

  “You too, Rodney.”

  I walked with him through the guys staring wild-eyed and the men chewing toothpicks, and we set up off to the side and started playing catch. He had a good arm and his throws popped in my mitt, making everyone turn for a look.

  “They hate me and they don’t even know me,” he said between throws. It wasn’t that he felt sorry for himself. It was more like he suddenly needed to say something that was true.

  “Don’t let it bother you,” I told him.

  Then he threw the ball so hard I thought for sure he’d broken a bone in my hand.

  Tater dazzled us all during the tryout, or at least those of us who bothered to pay attention to him. He still had that little oil-wet glove, and even though it was no bigger than his hand, nothing got past him. During drills, one of the coaches hit fly balls in the outfield, and we took turns catching them, and when one came off his bat too hard and sailed high over our heads and past us, it was Tater who broke from the group and chased it down, catching it at a full gallop with his back to the hitter, like Willie Mays. He could throw the ball on a rope from the outfield fence to home plate, and he was fastest on the base paths.

  The coach of the Redbirds, Junior Doucet, won a coin toss and made me the first pick of the draft, and all those boys later he made Tater the last pick. Tater had outperformed the other kids and me, but he’d come to us black, and for that he had to wait. That the park allowed him to play at all was the biggest surprise, although I learned later that some of the coaches thought the federal government had sent Tater to test town leaders who’d been resisting integration.

  One day that summer I got up the nerve to ask Tater why he was there.

  “South City Park is closer to where I live,” he said. “It’s less than a mile away. North City Park is more like three miles.”

  “We thought maybe you were sent to infiltrate the white culture and gather information for rabble-rousers bent on toppling our way of life.”

  “Who told you that?”

  I didn’t want to admit that it was Pops so I said, “I just heard it around.”

  Tater shook his head. “It’s two miles difference, Rodney. I don’t own a bike.”

  Mama worked at home as a seamstress. Pops worked as a night watchman at the plant in town where they made cooking oil.

  He punched in at 11:00 p.m. and punched out at 7:00 a.m., five days a week. Even though he had to get his sleep during the day, he still never missed any of my games, including those with early afternoon starts. I’d always look for him on the other side of the fence down on the first base line, standing by himself in his blue clothes, the leather strings on his steel-toe boots hanging loose. He never cheered or said anything when I got a hit or picked off a base runner trying to steal. He kept quiet even when we won close ones. My teammates said he looked “hard to know.” I explained that he’d served in Korea and just wasn’t one for any nonsense.


  I inherited my size from Mama’s people. She actually stood two inches taller and weighed about fifty pounds more than Pops. She called her business Unique Boutique, and she specialized in evening gowns. Ladies were always coming to the house to get measured, and there were always bal masque outfits draped over the furniture. You’d have to sit on the floor to watch TV so as not to rumple the pretty things she was making.

  Mama suffered from lupus and didn’t feel well outside in the hot sunlight, and this kept her from attending many of my games. Over supper I’d have to tell her how they went, and whenever I described something sensational like a grand-slam home run or a triple play, she’d turn to Angie and say “Is your brother lying again?”

  Angie was on the South City Park swim team and sometimes had to practice when I was playing, but she made most of my games and sat in the bleachers behind the backstop. She showed up with a sketchbook and a paint box full of colored pencils, and she made pictures of whatever caught her fancy: a player sliding into home, the pitcher coming out of his windup, dragonflies lighting on top of a batting helmet. Most people never guessed that we were twins—Angie was a green-eyed blonde and trim, while I was a brown-eyed monster who could make little kids cry if I looked at them too long—but Angie herself always said we were “one and the same and nobody without each other.”

  I believed this to be true, although we probably weren’t much different from most twins. We shared a room and slept in beds pushed up next to each other until a year ago when she got her first period and Pops decided it was time to turn the sleeping porch into a bedroom. I liked having my own space, but some nights I felt so lonely I couldn’t stand it. I’d return to Angie’s room, clear out a place on the floor next to her bed, and sleep there on a pallet of pillows.

  Today she was wearing a tank top and short shorts. You could see the tan lines on her shoulders left by her bathing suit, and she had a tied-off leather string hanging from around her neck with a key at the end of it.

  The key opened the lock on the rear gate of the park’s pool yard. Angie wore it like jewelry, she once explained to me, because it was good luck and a source of pride and something no other swim team member had, not even Craig Fink, the boys’ captain and a state champion in the breaststroke. The key meant she could let herself in anytime she wanted, and she often did so, bicycling to the park at 5:00 a.m. to get some laps in before the pool house opened at seven. Angie was oblivious to the reaction she brought out in guys our age, but that didn’t stop them from saying things.