T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

Candice reached across the table and took Charlie’s hands between her own.

I told everyone I was going to Berkeley to try out for the team, but I just wanted to be near San Fran. It was only after the first year at Berkeley that I realized I could possibly be open about what I was, but I still wasn’t ready. I’m not now. I am scared to do it and wanted to do it with someone who hadn’t done it yet either. Look at me, do I look gay? He stood and extended his arms, a solid shadow. They would say that’s why I didn’t make the football team. He sat back down.

There are plenty of gay athletes now. Candice stroked his arm. Someone famous comes out every week.

Famous. Precisely. If you try to walk on gay, forget it.

Wait a minute, this does not mean you’re gay, Daron whispered, looking around.

Does anyone know? asked Candice.

Weights, boxing, karate, football. My father suspected, which was why he was worried about the all-boys boarding school. My mother doesn’t know. It would kill her. My father made me promise that even if I decide to get into that life, I must never tell her. Her brother, my uncle, died of AIDS.

It just sounds like you might be confused. That doesn’t make you gay, argued Daron. I don’t like guys in their underwear but that vampire movie dude is handsome. That doesn’t make me gay. They had learned about this in school, about how not even gay sex makes you gay, like in prison, where it was merely situational sexual behavior. Prison sex, vo-technically speaking, was not homosexuality.

Louis would have come out, if he was gay. He would have done it. He would have. He would have.

Candice moved to sit beside Charlie. There, there. It was high school. We’re never as liberal as we want to be then. I broke up with Darnell Jackson right before prom because my mom put pressure on me over the pictures. She said, Me and your dad laugh at our prom pictures sometimes, and it’s such a joy to share them. You wouldn’t want to have to hide them, would you? I told them I was going with someone else and spent the evening at Denny’s. Louis wouldn’t have done that. He would have stood up to her. He would have gone with whomever he wanted. My mom’s funny. She’s funny. She thought I was gay for a while. Remember how I dyed my hair the first year and cropped it, a few weeks after the dot party?

Charlie muttered affirmatively.

Daron nodded.

The day after I uploaded the photo to Facebook to show off my new hairstyle, I updated my status to Abstract but not Vague. Two hours later, my mother called under the pretext of catching me up on family business. At the end of the longest conversation we’ve had since I was eight years old and stumbled across her Internet porn bookmarks, she was like, Your aunt Carrie called and told your father not to be upset when he saw your new picture, but he was. I’m thinking, like, Aunt Carrie, who lived like Carrie Fisher, but without the fame or money? So, my mom’s sounding all pained, like, Candy, it’s okay to experiment, but don’t advertise it. I grew it out, and haven’t cut it since. They’d threatened to make me transfer to Temple.

With a sharp rock, Daron scratched lines into the wooden bench. He felt their expectant gaze, as if yesterday was really only the result of secrets coming out to die like poisoned rats. So, I should have never shoplifted or batted mailboxes, and then he’d be alive? he asked. And why was Candice growing her hair out only to let it get all dreaded anyway?

It’s our fault. It’s our fault, repeated Charlie. In school they teased me, in public school that was, for being Mr. Charlie. Mr. Charlie, especially if I did well on a test. What do you expect from Mr. Charlie? they would ask. Now, asked Charlie, who am I? I’m Judas, Iago, Nixon. Washington, Ellison, Obama. A great conciliator. But a part of me — his voice dropped to a whisper — is so glad to be alive. Before with Tyler, and even now. This sliver of myself, that part wind-thin, and just as sharp, as my own nana used to say, was relieved when Tyler killed himself. I know God hates me for it. He gave me that ulcer, for starters. It was like swallowing razors. I spent half the time in the nurses’ station. He gripped Daron’s arms, staring like a wild man. I know God hates me for it, I know he does, but I felt that way again when I saw Louis yesterday. I saw him there with that shoe polish on his face and that wig, and the muscle suit, and I knew that would have been me, and I was glad I didn’t go. Glad to have been afraid.

Daron drew back from Charlie, shaking himself loose, brushing at his chest and arms as if to scatter the contamination. Charlie! Iago? Judas? Walking off, Daron thought conciliation was more his middle name than Charlie’s, was it not? Little May . Hadn’t he learned that much the first two years of college? Names were things, and things names, and both the stuff of thought, like stars, without which we wouldn’t even see the night sky. What was the difference between please, and can I, and yessuh, and may ? And Little May! Little May? Wasn’t that a whisper, a faint inquiry, a question asked reluctantly? Crying in Mrs. Brooks’s office like a bitch. How he wished she were here to talk to. She would understand. She would understand how he felt, how he wished so much he had defied his father’s wishes and been there to stop it. She would understand how it felt to hear his father tell him, Son, I would have preferred you defy me than abandon your friends, which no real man would do. She would have understood that his sin wasn’t any shameful act he’d hidden away, not even jumping to a confusion and thinking Candice had been raped by a Gull. His sin, if he had one, was no different from Alfred Kroeber’s, the sin of being born in a particular time and place, and there was nothing he could do about that.

Hirschfield was right about the media. The next morning, two days after the Incident, regional news stations flashed a ticker-tape teaser: THE FIRST LYNCHING SINCE ALA 1981? When the anchors spoke, there was no question mark in their tone. The Huffington Post and NYT.com ran editorials. Facebook was on fire, the posts on Louis’s wall growing by the minute, mostly from people who didn’t know that he was dead. The day before Hirschfield’s warning, Candice, always efficient with her 140 characters, had written a tweet heard around the Berkeley campus but impossible to contain there:

Louis Chang hung from tree MURDERED in GA by Confederate pretenders whipped and teased — laughing paraded his body to town on car hood.

The ambulance battery was dead, or the paramedics couldn’t get through the crowd, or there simply wasn’t enough time. Excuses abounded, but one fact remained consistent in every newsflash: Someone had laid Louis across the hood and driven him into town for medical help. The news outlets didn’t interpret it as quick thinking. Guided by Candice’s tweet, they were enraged that someone had savagely paraded the poor young man through town on a car hood, a heinous and vicious act outdone only by the insurgents who had dragged dead U.S. contractors, naked, through the streets of Iraq. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Moments before the Changs heard from Sheriff, Louis’s cousin had read the tweet and called them.

Daron’s mother had made up the guest bedroom (reserved for adults), fluffed the spare pillows, and inflated the air mattresses. There was no need. When the Changs arrived, they did not call the Davenports, let alone ask to stay in their home. As it was, the only reason his mom knew they were in town was because one of her knitting friends had called to report, A solemn Oriental family staying in the local Super 8. She’d heard from Quint that they had gone to the Gully, needing an undertaker skilled at adjusting necks just so. Daron learned of their arrival when he saw a photo of them on the local news.