Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

Black was beautiful, but black didn't exist in the pre — Lando Calrissian Star Wars universe beyond the malevolent black of Darth Vader. (And what about Lando's treachery in the Cloud City of Bespin once he did appear? Selling Han out, hitting on his lady. Some role model.) So in my games I became Greedo, the green, scalloped-eared, bug-eyed nemesis of Han Solo, or rather in my mythology, another alien from his home planet of Rodio — Greedo's cousin. Hence the family resemblance and predilection for ribbed bodysuits. He was a good kid, on the straight and narrow, unlike his relative. Or I was a Death Star Droid with human programming (not much of a stretch) or a defecting Stormtrooper, skin obscured behind the armor plates of the Empire. In my room, Greedo's cousin redeemed his people through his private war against the forces of evil. He was “a credit to his race.”

“Get in here!” I jumped up.

Someone had ratted me out. Reggie only ratted me out if we were fighting because it was a risky proposition — you never knew when our father would introduce an obscure subclause in the family rules of conduct, something along the lines of “You should have known better than to let your brother do that,” whereupon the rat was included in his brother's punishment. Take his belt off loop after loop and beat both of us. Don't cry or you'll get some more. Kept you on your toes. But we'd been getting along, Reggie and me, and in fact I had loaned him twenty-five cents that morning at my usual “it doubles every Monday” interest rate, for him to buy snacks. He fiended for Munchos, blowing through his allowance by midweek like a junkie.

I beat it out of our room and reviewed the last few days for any slipups. I couldn't think of anything. I had thrown two stalks of broccoli into the garbage, but I was sure that no one had seen me, and it had been almost a year since I got into trouble for not cleaning my plate. Maybe that rule was still being enforced, maybe it wasn't, you never knew. The rules came, the rules went, new rules were introduced. Then I remembered that I'd worn slightly wrinkled khaki slacks to school that morning. After being intercepted on our way out the door one day, we'd been admonished (that's not the word but that word will do) for wearing wrinkled clothing and from then on we had to lay out the next day's clothes before we went to bed, for inspection. It had to be the khakis. I'd taken a chance that my father wouldn't check them, and I'd lost.

He was on the couch. The TV was off, a bad sign. He said, “Your mother tells me you got into a fight at school today.” I had a bunch of thoughts all at once. 1. My mother had ratted me out. 2. I didn't have to revenge myself against Reggie, and I'd have to save the two or three plans I'd devised on the short walk to the living room for another day. 3. It wasn't the khakis, so I could risk another wrinkledclothes day in the future. 4. I had no idea what he was talking about. But this was a familiar situation. Familiar as in, family.

I looked at my mother. She didn't move. There was that way she used to sit in these situations, right, I remember now. I said, “I didn't get into a fight today.”

He looked at my mother and then he looked at me. He said, “Your mother said some boy called you a nigger at school today.”

Oh, he was talking about that . A week ago, during snack break, Tony Reece had done something weird to me. It was Tony Reece's first year at our school. His father was a bigwig at the French embassy. The headmaster and founder of our school was French and a number of French dignitaries sent their kids there, which meant that we watched a lot of François Truffaut movies and we celebrated Paris Day once a year, where we ate croissants and pain au chocolat while the French teachers shared some motherland tales, like childhood reminiscences about watching collaborators get their heads shaved. They snatched the hair from the ground as souvenirs. “You Americans were so shocked at Watergate,” our music teacher Madame Mamelock told us one day. “We have never believed in the powerful. The powerful are liars.” I was six.

Tony Reece only lasted a few years. He was a skinny little boy with dark eyes and a sinister up-curl to the left side of his mouth. On his first day, he ate his lunch on a white handkerchief that he unfolded delicately and placed on his desk. We all laughed at him and he never did it again, but he was constantly en garde from that moment on, fearful of these hot-dog-eatin' heathens and their New World cruelties.

The day my father was asking about, a bunch of us were goofing around during Snack. Andrea Rappaport had just come back from Saint Thomas and her face was pink, brown scales withering on her nose. We hadn't been on spring vacation — she'd gotten her school-work for the week in advance and done it in between trips to the pool. That's how her family rolled. There was a discussion about tanning while on vacation, the pros and cons, the various theories of how much was “too much tanning,” from which I abstained, and then Tony Reece reached over to my face, dragged a finger down my cheek, and said, “Look — it doesn't come off.”

He snickered, the right corner of his mouth curling up to complement the left, and I didn't get his meaning and then I realized, given the context of the conversation, that he was talking about my brownness. The other kids looked at one another, and what do fourth graders know about things, I don't know, but they knew wrongness when it happened right in front of them and Andy Stern who was my friend said, “Shut up, Tony Reece” and shoved his shoulder. “Where's your hankie, Frenchie?” Everybody laughed at Tony Reece. The bell rang for Social Studies, and we returned to our desks. I'd told my mother about it an hour or two before I was called to the living room, something to kill the time while she tossed pepper on the pork chops.

I said, “Oh, that was last week.” To get the facts straight. This was a misunderstanding. “He didn't say that.” I related my version of the incident.

My father looked at my mother and then he looked at me. “‘It doesn't come off,’” he said. “He was calling you a nigger. What did you think he was doing?”

“I don't know” slipped out of my mouth and I knew I had messed up because he hated “I don't know.” There was no purchase there. Actually, I think maybe he liked “I don't know” because then he got to pry you open.

“Why didn't you punch him like I told you?”

“I don't know.” I said it again, I couldn't help it.

“You were afraid he was going to hit you back.”

I couldn't say no and disagree with him. So I decided to agree with him. “Yes.” Surely if I stopped struggling, trying to wiggle out of this, I'd quickly be Greedo again.

“Like this?” His fast fast hand struck me across the face and iron rolled around in my head and my cheek pulsed with heat and felt like it had swollen up to twice its size. When I looked in the mirror later, it looked normal, if a bit red, but that's what it felt like. I heard Elena and Reggie close the doors to their rooms, but how could I hear that really, because they were too far away, but I just knew that's what they did because that's what we always did. In these situations.

“Can he hit you harder than this?” he asked, and he swatted me again, harder.

My eyeballs bobbed in their water. In the corner of my vision, my mother uncrossed her legs. I said, “I don't know.”

He swatted me in the face again, harder. This time I was ready and I told myself, don't fall over. “Can he hit you harder than that?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Then there's nothing to be afraid of.” A pause. I was breathing a lot through my nose. “Don't you cry now,” he said, so I didn't. “Who's going to protect you if you don't do it? Me? Your mother? The world's not going to protect you. That's what I'm trying to teach you.”