Percival Everett - I Am Not Sidney Poitier

What should have been a moment of triumph for me, standing up for myself and even settling the matter without blows, turned oddly sour as I realized that the kids around me were now afraid of me. By so daringly stepping away from my role as victim, I was to be feared, or at least made to feel like a shit for abandoning the rules.

I hated everything about everything. The rules that had been broken, the trust that had been broken, were all broken by that slutty history teacher, that orally fixated predator who didn’t know that normalcy was coined by a dumb president.

At home, I ate alone and in the dark. I paced the grounds. I was walking back and forth the length of the pool on Saturday morning when Ted came out in his trunks for a swim.

“Hey, Nu’ott,” he said, then dove into the deep end. He came up and looked at the sky. “I’ve never been struck by lightning. You?”

Had it been anyone but Ted I would have thought he was speaking metaphorically. But he was talking about lightning. “No,” I said.

“I bet it hurts like hell.”

“Well, my teacher failed me,” I told him.

“Wow.”

“I went back to her house, I don’t know why, and she did it again and I asked her not to and she said she’d fail me if I didn’t let her and so I let her and then she failed me anyway.”

“Wow.”

“I went to the principal, but he laughed.” I sat on the edge of a pool chair. “You know, I really don’t care, but I care. Know what I mean?”

“Absolutely.” He went under and came back up.

“What should I do?”

“I can’t tell you that, Nu’ott. You can climb the ladder of command if you want, but I can’t say that’s what you should do. You have to decide what you need out of this, what’s important to you. I wonder if you know the lightning’s coming. A fellow told me that when he got struck he felt like he had glass in his shoes. Welded his zipper shut. If I were you I might go to the school superintendent.” Then he was submerged again, swimming to the far side.

The following Monday I skipped school and went to the office of the superintendent of the school system. The downtown building that housed that office was glass and steel and looked like it was probably outdated and obsolete before it had been completed. Everyone there seemed shocked to see an actual student on the premises and stared at me like I was an experiment of some kind. I believe I got in to see the superintendent only because they were all so confused by my presence.

I stepped into the plush, tastelessly decorated office to discover that Dr. Gunther was a gray-haired woman with square glasses. From looking at her I felt confident that if she had ever seen a penis she certainly had not put the thing in her mouth. I had the immediate thought that I might fare better with her than I had with Mr. Clapper. She asked me to sit and if I’d like some water. I sat in the low, hard chair and said no to the water.

“What may I do for you, young man?” She pulled a pad of paper in front of her. “First, what is your name?”

“My name is Not Sidney Poitier.”

“I can well imagine.” She studied my features. “You do look a little like him. Now, what is your name?”

“Not Sidney Poitier. My name is Not Sidney Poitier.”

She appeared suddenly nervous, perhaps afraid, casting sidelong glances at her door and phone. “And you’re here because?”

“I’d like to report the inappropriate behavior of a teacher,” I said.

“Sexually inappropriate?”

“Yes. Of the oral variety.” I said this and looked away from her at one of the two big-eyed clown paintings on the wall behind her.

She appeared to be genuinely concerned. “Just where are you in school?”

“Decatur Normal.”

“And your principal is—”

“Mr. Clapper.”

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“And the teacher in question?”

“My history teacher, Beatrice Hancock.” I took pleasure in saying her name, so I said it again. “Beatrice Hancock.”

“And what did she do?”

I decided to not beat around the bush, but dove straight into it, to offer the shock of it. “She drove me to her tacky house, got on her knee-socked knees, and gave me what I have since learned is called a blow job.”

“She did, did she?”

“And, to tell the truth, she wasn’t very good at it. I don’t think it’s supposed to hurt.”

She cleared her throat. “Well, never mind that. This happened once?” Dr. Gunther asked.

“No, twice.”

“I thought you said it hurt.”

“It did, both times,” I said.

“Why did you let it happen a second time?”

“She forced me.”

Dr. Gunther stared at me for a few seconds. “Did you tell Mr. Clapper that Miss Hancock did this to you?”

“I did. He laughed.”

“You don’t mind if I call him, do you?”

I shrugged. As she asked her secretary to get Clapper on the phone I realized what a bad idea it was for me to be there. This woman didn’t believe me and wasn’t going to believe me. I thought she might call security at any second and that I would then be just one twitch away from getting shot by a product of this very school system. She smiled, rather insincerely, at me while she waited, receiver pressed to her small gray head.

“Mr. Clapper? Yes, this is Superintendent Mrs. Dr. Gunther Junior down here in the central office. Oh, I’m fine. And how are you? And how is your wife? And how are your children? I’m sitting here in my office with a tall young black man. Do you have a student named Poitier? Really. So, that actually is his name.” Her sounds became absurd and muted, and then she was nothing but a working mouth in front of me, like a crab eating. I wanted to dash out of there, down the glass-and-steel corridors and into the street, but I didn’t. Then the sound of her voice came back and now it was laughter, cackling, witch-cackling laughter, which at once frightened me, irritated me, and justified all of my not-so-kind preconceptions. She hung up the phone, looked at me, and laughed harder.

As I walked out of the building and into the light spring air, I realized that I truly did not care, not even about the principle. I had no desire to see Miss Hancock punished and no notion to give her a piece of my mind. It of course helped me in not caring to remember that I was filthy rich. Grades and diplomas, perhaps sadly, simply didn’t matter to me. And as far as blond Beatrice Hancock was concerned, at least she had learned to suck a penis without drawing blood, and so I had performed a sort of public service, offering a measure of protection to the next in her line of victims. I was fairly clear in my desire to become a high school dropout. I decided right then to light out for the territory, as it were, to leave my childhood, to abandon what had become my home, my safety, and to discover myself. Most importantly I wanted to find my mother’s grave and put something fitting, perhaps beautiful, on her headstone. What? I’d yet to figure that out. The warm and humid spring air filled me with clean inspiration and a sense of independence.

And so, this became a prophetically, apocalyptically instructive, even sibylline, moment. I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in this world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

I was my own person, so I was told, so I believed, and so I was treated by Ted, and so I therefore had no reason to sneak away from my so-called home, to leave covertly in the night without a word. Instead, I found Ted sitting on his veranda, surrounded by flowers he once told me he never liked, reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ’s sports page while having breakfast.