Michael Thomas: Man Gone Down

“Why don’t you want to sign?”

“What good would it do?”

“What do you mean?”

“No institutional legislation can change the hearts of bigots and chickenshits.”

Bigots and chickenshits, my boy was surrounded by them, and no one would come clean and say it, not even me. They would all betray him at some point, some because they actually were the sons and daughters of bigots and would become so themselves, some because they would never stand by his side — unswervable. Which little chickenshit would stand up for him when they chanted, “Brown like poop, brown like dirt”? They would all be afraid to be his friend. Even at this age they knew what it was to go down with him — my little brown boy.

The Whites were coming. I had to be ready.

“Get ready,” I said. I sent my little brown boy out and took a shower.

As soon as I finished, C knocked on the door. It was as if he’d been waiting right outside.

“Yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Wait.”

Noah had appeared naked before his son Ham, and Ham’s line was cursed forever. I didn’t want to start that mess again. I dressed quickly. I opened the door. My three children stood there: the brown boy, the white boy, and the girl of indeterminate race. They wore the confused look of children who’d just finished watching TV.

“She’s got a poop,” C said, pointing at his sister’s bottom, holding his nose.

“Yeah, poop,” said X.

“No poopoo,” said the girl. I scooped her up and smelled, then I peeked into her diaper.

“No poop.”

I got them dressed and presentable and lined up near the front door. I could hear Claire in the bathroom, fiddling with her mother’s makeup. She seldom wore anything besides lipstick. We heard the car pull onto the gravel driveway. C leaned toward the kitchen.

“Let’s go.”

“Wait until you’ve said hello.” Claire emerged from the bathroom. It looked as though the kids had shoved a golf ball up her nose and then set upon her sinus area with dark magic markers. Her children looked at her in horror, as though their mother had been replaced by some well-mannered pug.

C pulled on my arm. “Please.” He sounded desperate. He was looking at the door as though something evil was about to enter. The screen door whined and the knob turned and he bolted to the back. Edith walked in, saw her daughter, and gasped. She remembered she had company with her and turned to welcome them in.

The Whites were here: the grandmother, the daughter, the grandchildren, and the son-in-law. Edith held him by the wrist, squeezing it as though to reassure him. I don’t think Edith had ever touched me, other than by mistake — both reaching for the marmalade jar, both pulling back. Edith is still very beautiful. I think she’s a natural blonde. She has blue eyes, not lasers like X’s, but firm, giving strength to her diminutive self. Her skin is beach worn, permanently tanned from walks in the wind and sand. High cheekboned, long nosed, as if she was trying to assume the face of some long dead Peqout or Wampanoag. Massachusetts. I thought about the word, like a name, Massasoit, as though I was he, welcoming a visiting tribe from the south, the Narragansett.

The prelude to the introduction was taking too long. I offered my hand to my alleged peer. I’m six-three and have the hands of someone a foot taller. They are hard and marked by the miscues of a decade and a half of absentminded carpentry. His hand disappeared in mine, but he didn’t flinch. He did his best to meet me.

“Good to see you.” He let go, stepped back. The two women had joined Edith, staring at Claire’s nose.

“Hello,” said Claire to the elder, trying to break the spell. They stopped staring, but they couldn’t move. Claire hugged both of them, kissing the sides of their faces as well.

“It’s been so long,” she said to the younger. Claire is truly beautiful — in visage, in tone, in manner. She’s always had the ability, at least in the world she’s from, to make everything seem all right, to make people feel that things are in their proper place and all is well. It wasn’t working. As she held the younger’s hand, the elder surveyed the wreckage of miscegenation: the battered Brahmin jewel, the afro blonde in her arms, the brown man. What was there to say other than hello and good-bye? The elder looked from Edith to Claire to the girl to me. Her eyes darted faster and faster. For a moment I wanted to explain, begin the narrative simply because I believed I could and I knew she couldn’t: Milton Brown of Georgia raped the slave girl Minette. That boy-child escaped and was taken in by the Cherokee peoples on their forced march to Oklahoma.

Claire knelt to address the children — two boys, perhaps three and five. They were both hiding behind their mother’s legs. The younger bent down and pushed her sons in front of her. They couldn’t look at Claire. They buried their faces into their mother’s skirt.

“And who is this?” asked the younger, looking at X. “Oh, my goodness — those eyes!” She gasped, forgetting herself, forgetting her children. It was as if X really was reptilian and she’d fallen under his hypnotic spell. The White children, against their better judgment, turned as well. They looked as though they’d been bled, particularly next to X, who seemed ready to jump, howl, or sprint. He stared back at them, not with the fear and wonder with which they regarded him, but in an equally inappropriate way, as though he was a boy looking at cupcakes, or a carnivore looking at flesh — child-eyed, man-jawed. If there was to be a battle, it was obvious who would be left when everything shook down. The new world regarded the old world. The old world clung to its mother’s legs.

The younger tried to snap out of it. “You’re such a big boy.”

“I’m not a boy,” said X in his lisp-growl. “I’m a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

“Oh my,” she said, summoning courage for her and her brood. The other Whites tittered nervously. The elder joined in.

“You must be Michael.”

X kept staring at the children as though they were tasty meat bits.

“I’m not Michael! I’m X!”

The younger pressed on.

“These are my boys, James and George.” The smaller of the two leaned his head forward and smiled.

“Hi.”

The Whites and Edith smiled, and then cooed in unison, “Oh.”

Edith leaned into X. “Michael, can you say hello?”

“I’m not Michael. I’m X.”

“Hello,” said the older child.

The bastard half-breed son of Milton and Minette was a schizophrenic. He married a Cherokee woman and they had two children. He disappeared, and she and her children were considered outcasts on the reservation. One day she left with them and headed east.

“I’m brown,” said X.

“No, you’re not,” said the older child. “You’re white.”

“I’m brown!” he growled. “I’m the tyrant lizard king!” He snorted at them. The boys took a step back. X widened his nostrils and sniffed at them in an exaggerated way. He opened his eyes wide so that they were almost circles and smiled, coolly, making sure to show his teeth. He leaned forward and sniffed again.

She met the traveling preacher-salesman Gabriel Lloyd, settled in central Virginia, and had one child with him. Then she and Lloyd died.

“I eat you.”

As she tells it, once an acquaintance of Claire’s who knew nothing of me had asked her upon seeing C for the first time, “How did you get such a brown baby?” Claire had shot back, “Brown man.” I went outside to find C. Like his younger brother, he can smell fear. It makes X attack. The same fear causes C to withdraw — to keep his distance. He was standing in the middle of the yard with his back to the window and his ball under one arm.