Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

The school’s headmaster—the man who had agreed to my admittance—had gone “up north” for some number of years. His surname was the name of the school, and everyone knew it was his family’s money that kept that dying boarding school from going under. At school assemblies, this headmaster would find excuses to parade me across the stage—my improbably strong elocution, the sharp crease in my uniform—defiant or oblivious to the contempt my visibility inspired. Even the dimmest boys were clever in their cruelty. Mother had been hired to cook and clean at the headmaster’s residence in town, and for this, the others mocked her mercilessly. What could I do, it was true—my scholarship was her bowed back, her bleach-bitten hands. Enrolling me there must have been an act of faith or desperation, like pressing a message into a bottle and floating it onto turbulent waters.

Even so I clung to my formal education, setting off at seventeen to a small all-black college, then going far north for graduate school. The boys I’d grown up with mostly stayed rooted. They married girls from church, worked hard to scrape together a living or get ahead. Some were shipped off to Vietnam, a few marched in bigger towns, facing police dogs and fire hoses. I devoted my life to scholarly truth, spending the majority of my adult life here at this esteemed institution. After you were born, I purchased my own home, just a two-bedroom bungalow, but in a good neighborhood not far from campus. I can walk to work, and sometimes I do. Whenever I walk my mind wanders. Occasionally I worry that I’ve been self-indulgent in my research, somehow selfish in my secret fatherhood. Walking, I think the world is surely a better place now than it used to be for people of color. Aren’t I myself living proof against my theories? Can’t I be satisfied?

But then, like current, I’ll feel it again, even now. It might be the guard at the campus market who follows me when I walk in to buy a carton of milk for my tea. Or a pair of young mothers who push their strollers widely around me on the great lawn. Mostly it’s a growing unease about my career. Yes, I was hired. Yes, I’ve managed to keep my head above water, but in these final years, they’ve burdened me with the lowliest committee assignments, filled my schedule with 100-level classes, as if I were an adjunct. Of course this might be a reflection of some defect in my performance—a failure to publish as well as some colleague down the hall, my secret research obscuring my official work. But how can I know for sure? How does anyone know if they are getting more or less than they deserve? All I know for certain is that, last September, a police car trailed me when I was walking home one brisk evening. Me, Professor Cornelius Adams, in my sixties, in my overcoat and loafers, my briefcase clutched beneath my arm. As you well know, cruisers often patrol the edges of campus, quieting fraternity parties, corralling drunken freshmen back onto grounds. They only pulsed their lights at me. When I turned, the one on the passenger side—a black officer—shouted from his window. Where was I going, he wanted to know. Before I could gather words to answer, a more urgent call must have come in. They turned on lights and sirens in earnest and sped away.

Here are our lives laid out together: At ten, while I flailed beneath the blows of work boots, you flew down a zip line at a well-rated day camp. At twelve, while I reread tattered spy novels on the bumpy ride back home from that boarding school, your baseball team placed second in the region. You brought home a trophy. Your mother took a photo of you lifting it. Eventually she sent it to me.

As you grew older, I continued to make certain wishes clear to your mother—about your friends, your schooling, about the crop and length of your hair. Only once did she truly bristle at my intervention, when I insisted you leave swim team your senior year. The swimming had been good at first, but then you placed at state, a dive so graceful a big-league coach courted you. For a season, you took private lessons, shearing your hair, waking before dawn. You excelled in the water, your mother said—you might get a scholarship or more, so why not let you continue? I could feel her picturing you, her black son, draped in red, white, and blue, holding gold. In truth, I entertained this vision too, but in the end, I couldn’t allow such a glaring deviation. When you were small, I’d worried you would sink below my ACMs, that you would be dragged down. But here you were, soaring too high for a fair comparison instead. Of course I did not say any of this to your mother. All I could do was remind her of my unwavering discretion: Hadn’t I held up my side of the bargain all those years? When I said this, she hung up on me, and for a long time we did not speak, though I soon found out that the swimming had stopped.

And so I was surprised when your mother called last August to inform me that you were transferring here to finish your degree. I was only startled to hear her voice. I already knew you were coming, of course—I’d seen it on your social media. Perhaps your return was an act of muscle memory: all the years spent here at daycare, then later, in the back offices with your mother. It’s possible too that you were persuaded by the slick recruiting packets I mailed to your PO box each semester. Two years you’d attended that out-of-state school, and while you were away, I followed you as best as I could, though less closely than felt comfortable. Like any parent whose child leaves for college, I was forced to let go of some of my sway—though this gap depressed me. Were you drinking too much? I wondered. Had you gotten in a fistfight, or fallen in love with somebody? I drove up to your campus once, but found the whole layout disconcerting—and never did set eyes on you. After that, I watched from a safer distance, monitoring arrest reports, subscribing to your local and school media sites. I hoped to catch a glimpse of your life. Did it resemble the lives of my ACMs, those boys I’d watched so ardently years earlier—their drunken escapades, their fearless hearts?

All I know is, when I spotted you here, you looked tall, so lithe. I did the math—your age against mine—and you’d just turned twenty-one. Whatever else had happened in the intervening years, you’d also become a man. Your visible ease in your own skin awakened something in me. Never mind those tragic stories from other towns and cities, young men lost and taken—they were not you, they were not mine. Your ascendance was a glimpse of what could be and their deaths felt submerged. I realized you had never been average: you were more like a line of poetry too lofty for me to decipher. With you here, I convinced myself that you’d made it out past an invisible trip wire, out to some safe and boundless future. Even if I could not be part of that future, I might still be able to revel in its promise. I was nearly ready to give up on my questions, or claim that they’d been answered favorably—those questions of mine, which had always been about hope.

But then—we both know what happened then.

As soon as I heard what they’d done to you, I wrote through that first long night and cancelled my next day’s classes. Decades of research became a single anguished letter detailing the difference I could now measure on your face. I wrote about the burden of Race—how it warps the lives of black and white people. I did not speak of my experiment directly. Instead I used what happened to you as an anchor for my findings. I could never have predicted that my essay would spread so widely, that inside of a week I’d be invited to appear on several networks and a handful of national radio shows. In studio after sound stage, I laid out my meticulous argument, supported by data and by true stories I’d witnessed with my own eyes. I thought they’d be convinced, but instead they interrupted with other stories, opposing conclusions. I thought they might believe me, but instead they held up a few undisciplined lines from my essay as proof that I was angry and absurd. Death threats flooded my inbox, along with crooning love letters from mothers and sisters, from fathers and sons. Still, last night, I was contacted with an offer of publication—not from a prestigious university press, as I’d always envisioned, but rather a two-book deal from a large, traditional publisher best known for true crime stories. Maybe there I can finally write what I want—if it’s all right by you—about what’s been done to me, about the things I’ve done.