Call Me by My Name Read online

  “God, she’s fine,” I heard Randy Billedeaux say at the start of batting practice.

  “Knock it off. That’s his sister,” Tater said before I could speak up.

  He and I were waiting for our turns at the plate. Five cuts were all you got before games, and things moved fast.

  “We’re what’s called fraternal twins,” I told him, for some reason thinking he should know. “Mama might’ve carried us at the same time, but somehow we came out different. I was born before she was, but I never knew if that’s why I’m so much bigger.”

  “I had me a twin once,” he said.

  “What do you mean you had one?”

  “It was a girl too. Rosalie. She came out already deceased. That’s what my auntie told me, anyway.” He pronounced it ahn-tee. “My great aunt, I should say. She’s my mom’s mother’s sister. I live with her.”

  “Why don’t you live with your parents?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “But why don’t you?”

  “Because I don’t, all right?”

  I couldn’t imagine life without my parents, but life without Angie would be even worse. “All right,” I told him.

  By the bottom of the fifth inning the score was 9–0. We were winning again, and the game must’ve been boring to watch because the bleachers were quiet and even Angie had stopped cheering. The league had a ten-run rule, which meant we needed only one more run for the umps to call the game. Tater was the first batter up, and I was right behind him in the lineup.

  “Which one of you is going to end this thing and let us go home?” Angie called from her seat.

  I was in the on-deck circle. I lowered my bat and lifted my gloved left hand over my head. Tater stepped out of the batter’s box and signaled for a time-out. Now he raised a hand too.

  “Do it for me, Tater,” Angie said.

  He shook off a laugh and seemed to have trouble regaining his concentration, but he still managed to crush the first pitch that came at him. The ball flew high over the left field fence for a home run, and the game was over. Tater ran around the bases at a slow jog. He crossed home plate and fell into my arms and those of our teammates. Then he casually walked over to the backstop. Angie was standing and applauding along with everybody else. Tater pointed at her. “You asked for it,” he said.

  But the old lady standing in front of Angie thought Tater was talking to her. “I did?” She tapped a wrinkled hand against her chest. “Why, thank you, boy.”

  I guess that taught him. Tater would hit more home runs that summer, but he never again was quite so proud of himself afterward.

  We lived about a mile from the park on Helen Street, and even after Pops converted the porch, the house still had only about a thousand square feet of living space. There was one bathroom for the four of us, and it was barely large enough to hold a sink, a toilet, and a tub. The house had a TV antenna on the roof and striped metal awnings over the windows. We thought the asbestos siding was pretty, especially during a rainstorm when the material repelled water and shone with a pearl’s iridescence.

  Pops wasn’t a complicated man, but I still didn’t understand him. His happiest moments seemed to come when he was by himself—out fishing at Bayou Courtableau or tending to his vegetable garden behind the house. He grew some pretty tomatoes, along with cucumbers, squash, snap beans, and eggplant. He’d put the vegetables in brown A&P bags and drive in the Cameo from house to house, knocking on doors and taking his hat off when somebody answered. “We’re about drowning in them,” he’d say as he handed over each bag. It was strange seeing him be all generous with the neighbors, especially when you compared him to the Pops we got at home. Angie always said that the only time we saw flowers in the house was on days after Pops had a moody spell and needed to make up with Mama.

  We couldn’t afford to have a black lady come in and clean the house like others on the south end could. These neighbors weren’t well off either, but their jobs as bank tellers and schoolteachers and auto mechanics earned them enough to hire full-time maids and yardmen. I couldn’t imagine how little a maid and a yardman were earning if they depended on the guy from Lalonde’s Cajun Plumbing for their livings.

  That first summer with Tater was just starting when one of the guys on our team, Marco Miller, pulled me aside during practice and told me he had a secret. He looked around to make sure we were alone. “Tater’s auntie, the lady he lives with . . . ? She’s our maid. She cleans our house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Her name is Miss Nettie. Last night I rode with my mother when she took her home. I knew Miss Nettie had somebody she was raising, but I didn’t know it was Tater until we got there. It was starting to drizzle, and he came outside with an umbrella. I don’t think he saw me, but they live in a shack. It’s so small, it looked more like a doghouse than a house where people live.”

  Tater was in the outfield shagging flies. We both looked at him.

  “So that’s your secret?” I said.

  “Mom told me Tater’s father shot his mother, then shot himself. Tater was just a baby in the house in a crib, but that’s how he wound up with Miss Nettie. Miss Nettie is old. She didn’t want to take him, but there wasn’t nobody else.”

  Something jumped in me, sort of like the way it did that day they threw shell at him. I’d known Marco Miller since Little League and never had a problem with him. But right then I felt like laying him out. It was his tone I didn’t appreciate, the satisfaction he took in letting me know that Tater was a kid nobody wanted.

  Making me feel almost as bad was knowing that Tater had kept this information from me. I’d thought we were better friends than that. “Don’t tell this to anybody else,” I said to Marco.

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s nobody’s business. And don’t let him know that you know.”

  “Don’t let who know?”

  “Tater. Come on, man. Who else?”

  Along with the size, I had a death stare that I liked to use to instill fear in my opponents. I gave Marco Miller one now.

  “I hear you,” he said, and walked off.

  I didn’t go straight home after practice. Instead I rode my bike a distance behind Tater and followed him up Bertheaud Avenue to where it crossed Railroad Avenue and the train tracks to Burleigh’s corner grocery. He went into the store and came out a few minutes later with some ropes of licorice and a bottle of red pop, then he walked up Washington Street a couple of blocks to Park Avenue and took a left. The neighborhood changed now from white to black. I’d heard stories about white kids who’d had their bikes stolen out from under them when they drifted into this part of town. But it worried me more that Tater would catch me tagging behind him.

  He walked up a ways under the shade of some gnarly old cedar trees and hung a right on Abe Lincoln Street. The house he went into wasn’t much, but it wasn’t as bad as Marco had described. A yellow porch light was burning and a single kitchenette chair stood on the front porch. Fig and kumquat trees grew in the side yard. The back had a wire fence keeping some chickens in, along with a small coop made of rusty wire and gray boards.

  We were still inside the city limits, but the place looked like it belonged in the country alongside a road nobody drove down anymore.

  I rode up closer and halfway hid behind a tree. A car drove past—either a Firebird or a Camaro, I couldn’t tell which—and I could hear music even though the windows were up.

  As well as I thought I knew the town, and as much as I’d roamed it, this place was like finding a door in your home that you’d never noticed before and opening it to a room that you hadn’t known was there. It occurred to me that there was a world I knew nothing about, and this was the world of colored people. God or somebody or something had made things in two parts—the white part and the colored part, and here was that other one. They must’ve had college-educated profession
al people like doctors and lawyers and teachers. They must’ve had priests and preachers and morticians and accountants and insurance agents. But I had never seen those kinds among them. I’d only seen the ones who worked in the service trade. In other words, the ones who served the whites.

  I was getting ready to head home when Tater poked his head out from the screen door, then bounded off the porch and came running toward me.

  “Hey, Rodney,” he said. “My auntie wants to know if you’d like to have supper with us.”

  “No, thank you, Tater.”

  “She’s frying pork chops.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Did you hear me, man? I said pork chops. You’re going to take a pass on pork chops? What is wrong with you, brother?”

  I left him and started pedaling as fast as I could down Railroad Avenue. I wasn’t far along when I heard him call out, “Okay, be that way then,” and finally, “Bye to you too.”

  Railroad ended and became Parkview Drive, and now the houses got bigger and some were brick. I shouldn’t have raced off, but the prospect of dinner with him and his aunt had made me nervous. Pops could barely tolerate seeing Tater and me play ball together, and I knew how he’d act if he ever learned that I’d gone so far as to share food with him, too.

  As I rode home, I kept wondering about the differences between the world where Tater lived and the one I came from. Four years ago Pops had been able to tell a black pecan from a white one, and that was only a starting point. I’d also heard him call dogs that belonged to black people “black dogs,” even though their fur was white or brown or some other color. A dog could be purebred with papers, but if it belonged to a Negro, it was a black dog and nowhere near the equal of the lowest mutt that belonged to a white person. Cars were “black cars” when black people owned them, and it didn’t matter if their paint jobs were actually white or green or some other. There were black stores, too, and black clothes and black music and black food. And to Pops the color always meant not as good. Even when applied to a human being like Tater.

  I got home and could smell Mama’s cooking out in the carport. It was fried pork chops, and I figured there must’ve been a sale today at the A&P for the white shoppers as well as the black ones. Angie was setting the table as I came through the door, and Mama was at the sink mashing some potatoes. It got hot inside whenever they used the stove, which was a big Chambers installed in the 1940s when the house was built. Pops was sitting over by the window unit, reading the paper and trying to keep cool. He had the Astros game on the radio, and he was already dressed for work, his hair swept straight back and showing comb marks. He hadn’t put on his boots yet, and you could see his white ribbed socks folded over at the ankle.

  Maybe because I still had the story about Tater’s parents in my head, but I glanced over at Pops’s Chiang Kai-shek rifle hanging on a rack on the wall. He’d taken it off a dead enemy soldier and displayed it now as a trophy for all to see. Right below it and covered with a frilly dress half-made was Mama’s sewing machine.

  “Rodney, where you been, son?” Pops said, and lowered the volume on the radio.

  I propped my bat with my mitt hanging from the barrel against where the pie safe met the wall.

  “Practice, and then I followed Tater Henry home.”

  “You followed him home? Why would you do that?”

  “Just curious, I guess.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “What could there possibly be about a colored boy that makes anybody curious?”

  It was the kind of question that really was a statement, so I figured he didn’t require an answer. I sat in my chair.

  Angie’s freckles came out whenever she got too much sun, and they were out now on her cheeks and the crown of her nose. Even though the house smelled of fried food, I could smell chlorine when she sat next to me.

  Pops came over and joined us at the table. “Rodney,” he said, meaning he’d selected me to say grace. I made the sign of the cross and said the prayer in what felt like slow motion, knowing that if I went too fast, he’d only have me say it over again. I finished and reached for the potatoes.

  “Tater invited me to supper,” I said.

  “Supper, did he?” Pops said. “Imagine that—supper with the brothers and the sisters.”

  “I told him I couldn’t.”

  “They prefer to be called Negroes or coloreds,” Angie said.

  “Were you polite?” Mama asked. “Did you thank him?”

  “Thank him?” Pops said.

  “It wouldn’t have been the first time I ate black food,” I said. “I spent the night at T-Boy Bertrand’s once, and his maid cooked supper. It was fried chicken, turnip greens, smothered black-eyed peas, and cornbread.”

  “Was it good?” Mama asked.

  “It was delicious.”

  “Mama’s cooked all those things before,” Angie said. “What made what you ate at T-Boy’s black food?”

  “Because the maid cooked it?” I answered in the form of a question, which let her know how ignorant she was.

  Then we looked at her, all three of us, in a way that must’ve had her wondering if we’d ever really noticed her before.

  More and more people started turning out for our games. Nobody said it was because there was a black guy playing in the white park, but I couldn’t think of another reason to explain it. Where in years before, you’d get one parent for every player on a team; now both parents showed up, along with siblings and grandparents, and even cousins and friends from the neighborhood. The younger people in the crowds probably came to see a special talent play, but I agreed with Pops and his theory about why so many older folks were showing up—they wanted to be there in case the Black Panthers marched on the park and the white youth needed protecting.

  The bleachers filled up early, and people ringed the field with lawn chairs. They brought metal ice coolers stamped with beer logos, and they popped their cans and drank. Their feet were propped up on the wire fence.

  We won all our games that month. Tater played center field and hit third; I was the catcher and cleanup hitter. If any of the guys on the other teams were ugly to him, I never saw it. However, I did hear that a gang of potheads jumped him one day when he was walking home. They’d been hiding behind a large brick barbecue pit in the picnic area, and Tater had to fend them off with a stick.

  “Wasn’t nothing,” Tater said when I asked him about it.

  “Did they hit you?”

  “Yeah, they hit me. But I hit them back.”

  Over the July Fourth weekend we faced the Steers. We were both undefeated and dominating all the other teams, and the winner would claim first place and the fast track to the town’s Babe Ruth League title. Curly Trussell was the Steers’ best player, and he’d already pitched a no-hitter against the league’s third-best team, mainly by throwing curveballs, sliders, and other junk of such quality that he had everybody rocking back on their heels and whiffing.

  Half an hour before our scheduled 5:00 p.m. start, the field was packed four deep along the base lines. We were taking batting practice when I heard the first heckler. Tater was at the plate. On the other side of the fence was a man with a can of Old Milwaukee in his hand. He leaned heavily against the dented chicken wire and belched.

  “Hey, batter batter,” he said. “Hey, batter batter . . .”

  I’d heard the chant before, but then the man substituted the word “batter” with something else, and Coach Doucet immediately came running over and yelled at the man to watch his mouth.

  “How you do that, Junior?” the man said. “Watch my mouth?” Now he crossed his eyes and looked down his nose. “Show me how you do that.”

  Coach Doucet didn’t have an answer, but at least he’d distracted the man, and Tater was able to finish his swings.

  “What a bunch of garbage,” I said as Tater walked pa
st me.

  He leaned his bat against the fence and walked into the dugout for his glove. “Let it go, Rodney.”

  “You didn’t hear the name that dude was calling you?”

  He shook his head. “Let it go,” he said again.

  Coach Doucet and the coach for the Steers met with the umpires at home plate and exchanged lineup cards, and I drifted out past first base, looking for Pops. He wasn’t in his usual spot, and I couldn’t locate him on the other side of the field either. “Here, Rodney,” I finally heard him call out. And I spotted him with Angie and Mama in the bleachers behind the backstop.

  It really did something to me, seeing my family there, Mama especially. She was wearing a straw hat and big, square-frame sunglasses, and she’d brought a fan to help with the heat. The lupus alone should’ve kept her home and out of the sun, but I also knew she was ashamed of her weight and dreaded bumping into people who might remind her that she was a beauty in high school and the first runner-up in the 1949 Yambilee Queen pageant.

  I had Curly to worry about, so I didn’t let myself dwell on Mama for long. He was only about half my size, but he was so intense that kids in the park said he belonged in Pineville, a town in the central part of the state where there was a big hospital for mental patients. His father ran a bar on the parish line, and nobody but her customers ever saw his mother anymore. Curly might’ve been white trash, but he could really make you look stupid, and I looked extra stupid my first two times at bat when I didn’t even get the bat off my shoulder and watched one fastball after another run past me.