T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

Everyone knows we were joking. They could even ask the girls in that Lou Davis’s Cash and Copy store.

Of course! Charlie yelled. Independent verification by associate agents of the white girl brigade. It’s always sunny in Candyland. You walked into an RV parking lot, without a word, expecting someone to let you into their home, on wheels, but a home, to use the bathroom. And they did, and they fed us. Because of you. Don’t you get it? Both of you are playing games that you can’t lose. I should have stayed out of this from the beginning. I should have listened to my father. When he sent me off to that school he said, Do your best, be your best, ignore the ignorant. Sometimes ignorance goes into remission and can be cured. Often it’s metastasized, like my cancer, and nothing can be done about it. So that’s why you have to ignore it, no matter what anyone says to you. Racism is white peoples’ problem. They made it and they’ll have to fix it.

I’m sorry.

Me, too.

Me, too.

They carried the somber mood to the bedroom, where they argued again. Candice still upset that she had not seen him one last time, Charlie repeating that they should have gone, Daron yelling that he would have gone had Charlie gone and then the knots would have been tied correctly. So Louis’s death is my fault, stammered Charlie, ending the discussion, for at last they had said aloud their friend’s name.

Adam Turing Hirschfield III moved like a ninja, light and quiet on his toes, on which he often stood. Daron would not have been surprised had Hirschfield opened his leather briefcase to reveal a collection of sparkling silver shuriken carefully nestled in fitted Styrofoam. He was diminutive, but when he spoke, his voice filled the room like a perfect gas, and he dressed impeccably. His suits must have been expensive, the sleeves seeming to anticipate his every move, the cuffs and collar starched so white, bleached to blind. If a superhero wore a suit, he would dress like Hirschfield. And he hit the courthouse like a superhero, at least in voice. His exact physical manner there was harder to describe. How he had confronted Sheriff in a matter-of-fact way — offering only half his attention, offering Sheriff the opportunity to share the transcripts or find himself buried under some arcane laws he would get a hernia lifting. And, were a superhero subpoenaed, he would retain a Hirschfield to represent him. His firm was a marquee name in Los Angeles and New York, that breed of old-school attorney that rarely appeared on television because they represented studios more frequently than stars.

When Charlie was in ninth grade, and that school offered him that academic scholarship with the matching tie and helmet, his father said, This is the end zone, son. This may be as far as football takes you. Your friends now are good kids, a few of them, that is. But most of them won’t amount to shit. I know that. You know that. His father had then steered him by the elbow to the window, where he pointed at Charlie’s friends, who had appeared as if on his father’s payroll: Rock and T-bone were posted up on the corner spitting freestyle, each with one thumb hooked on his belt loops, behind them the busted windows and the barbed wire around the school. Hell, they know that. But your friends at this new school, well, they’ll be somebodies. One might even be president one day. (Charlie had been scouted, courted, but felt like Rumpelstiltskin. When the recruiter made that home visit, he felt like a daughter being married off, like a bride-to-be who, in sight of three aunts, two grandparents, and in-laws, had agreed to marry her high school beau with whom she hadn’t even slept, not for love but only because a tour of duty felt impossibly long and probably terminal. What would he do in a school of white people? Plenty, as it turned out. As he admitted to Daron, Chase and Hunter and Preston were quick to befriend, slow to know, in short, the opposite of Cassius and Hovante and Tyrone. Charlie soon grew to like companionship without the burdens of intimacy, to no longer wonder whether to tease Hovante to cheer him up when his father was bending corners again, or to avoid teasing Cassius because it was his mother this time. And his teachers, Christ. They knew, how he didn’t know, but they knew that his father was wasting away, swarmed him with compliments, one had even said, You’re not going to be a statistic.)

It was too soon to know if a classmate would be president, but one of them, Alexander, the starting quarterback for three years, was the son of the third generation of Golds in Hoffman, Gold, and Sons. He was also the great-nephew of the original Hoffman. This was no accident, and Alexander’s father, who wore that same school tie, never neglected to remind his son and his son’s friends how lucky they were to grow up in the Midwest. The coast is good for some things, but a successful man must have values, and those start here, in the heartland.

Alexander heard about the Incident at Braggsville, as the media was referring to it the morning after, and next thing they knew, the now 3 Little Indians were seated at the Davenport kitchen table with a man whose tailored suit cost more than the refrigerator and who may have been the one to keep Lindsay Lohan and Robert Downey Jr. on the road for so long, on the studio’s behalf, of course.

Here sat Daron in the same kitchen where he’d once made homemade costumes under his mother’s tutelage: a knight, a crusader, an astronaut. On the side of the refrigerator hung one crayon pig wearing the blue Nikes D’aron so treasured in elementary school. That was the first pig he ever drew, and it had been in that same spot for years, protected by plastic wrap. The magnet that now held it was from a photo booth at the California State Fair: Daron, Candice, Charlie, and Louis wearing face paint and feathers costing ten dollars a go, but the money was for charity, and the opportunity too good to pass up. Beside that was a photo of Big Quint, his uncle who had died in Desert Storm, making two Vs with his hands. Beneath that was a photo of D’aron geared up for his first hunt, age eight, making the same Vs that his uncle, and, he realized, his roommate used to. Louis had only been there for a day, but the house already felt haunted by his absence, and the presence of the lawyer who filled the room, who — Daron at last figured out — had the manner not of a superhero, but of an undertaker, one possessing that rare and certain confidence in the inevitable necessity of his services.

Daron, his parents, and his friends sat at the table stirring cold coffee. Hirschfield had declined a beverage. Occasionally, Candice moaned and readjusted her position. Her foot kept falling asleep, and she couldn’t scratch or flex it, poor thing.

Hirschfield paced the room, scanning the transcripts, running his finger along the page until he found what he was looking for. Ah, here it is. He read slowly, Ten kids in white suits with red dots on their butts run through communion. No. Just, no. He looked at each of them in turn. I am charged with advising all of you until you secure individual representation. That comes from the top, so for efficiency’s sake, we’re holding this joint meeting. And Charlie, Mister-Race-Is-a-Performance, Mister-Sir-Every-Other-Minute? Adaptive testing transforms the examination into an assessment of strategy? Fortifies enduring social asymmetry? Enactments of concretized ideologies? That’s a no-no. Open wide — let me see your teeth. Hirschfield enacted a dentist, continued speaking only when satisfied all enamel was present and accounted for. Charlie, your mom wanted you home if there was any uppity-Plessy, so you’re flying out tomorrow with me. Daron, you better well figure out what this performative intervention is because whether you were there or not, you’re the mastermind based on the sole fact that this is your hometown. Hirschfield paused, apparently waiting for Daron to indicate his understanding.