Percival Everett - I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“Will you help me find one of dem schools?” Sis asked me.

“Sho he will,” Patrice said.

“And I kin go to school, too?” Bobo asked.

“You sho kin,” Patrice said. He leaned his head back and looked up at the clouds. “What I wouldn’t give fer a drank.”

“I got a bottle in my suitcase,” Sis said. “Thought it might come in handy.” She opened the leather bag and pulled out a mason jar with a lid. It was filled with a clear liquid.

“Well, dang it to mercy, I knowed I loved you all along,” Patrice said. He took the jar, unscrewed the lid, and took a whiff. “Lawdy, that smells fine, finer than frog’s hair.” He took a swig and coughed. “Here, honey, have a bite.”

Sis took a long drink and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. She handed the jar to Bobo and he did the same. Bobo gave the jar back to Patrice. I was thoroughly and absolutely disgusted, yet somehow not surprised at all.

Patrice pushed the jar toward me, but I waved it off. I watched them drink themselves unconscious, and I realized that it didn’t matter where they were, they would never be going anywhere.

The train’s whistle blew. It was coming and I was the only one awake. I did not wake them. The locomotive passed, and I walked to the tracks. Just as Sis had said, the train was moving very slowly up the grade. I found an empty boxcar and easily climbed into it. Alone. I left them sleeping there where they belonged, with one another.

I didn’t want to believe, nor could I imagine, that Ted was manipulating the crosshairs of the planchette to make the Ouija Board answer my questions in a particular way, but it was the only viable explanation. To my sad question “Will I be stuck in Atlanta forever?” the board said, “Could be.” To my panicked “Am I crazy,” it was similarly noncommittal, saying, “Perhaps.” And finally to my offhanded question, “Was I really in utero for twenty-four months?” it was irritatingly and aggravatingly more definite, giving the response “Without a doubt.”

Ted and I were sitting on the edges of lounge chairs by the pool. Jane was steadily swimming laps, her large feet and long legs propelling her slinky red-bikinied body.

“You know where the name of the Ouija Board comes from, Nu’ott?” Ted asked. “It’s from the French and German words for yes. Could just have easily been called the non-nein. Of course that’s just one theory. There are probably many. I find it simply strange that the skin they pack sausages in is edible. Edgar Cayce thought they were dangerous.”

“Sausages?”

“No, Ouija Boards. Why would Edgar Cayce care about sausages? Maybe he did. He was a weird dude. And sausages are everywhere.” Ted looked at his bare feet at the end of his chinos. “Let me ask it a question. Why can’t the Democrats come up with decent slogans?”

“I think that might be a long answer,” I said.

“My point exactly. Republicans run around chanting ‘America, love it or leave it’ and ‘Freedom isn’t free.’ ”

“The board can’t handle that,” I said.

“We ought to market a better one. Pigs are really smart, you know.”

I hadn’t said it, but I’m certain Ted knew it. I felt like a failure. I had set out on my own and had come back with my pathetic tail between my legs. Actually, I was more than a little bit lucky to have come back with a tail at all, much less one unbothered by my unseemly Peckerwood County — work-farm brethren. Failure might have been too strong a term only because I hadn’t had any real goals when I set out. That finally was my awakening, my revelation from that brief and both eye-opening and eye-closing experience, that I, sadly, had no direction in life, and my new mission became to discover some mission.

“You could go to college,” Ted said.

I shrugged. “I’m a high school dropout.”

“With scads of money, my friend, with scads of money.”

That was true, and I knew just what he meant, which in itself might have been evidence enough that I didn’t need a university. However, at last, I was large enough in stature to not be pushed around physically, and suddenly I wanted, for whatever reasons, to be near people my own age, most especially women. Even as I thought it I knew I was being naïve. People had never treated me well, and I had no reason to expect they would change just because I was bigger.

“Definitely,” Ted said. “College would be great for you. A time for searching and growth, for exposure to new and uninteresting subjects. I think that they should be called tax cells instead of brackets.”

My first letter to the so-called development office of Morehouse College offering them a bit of a portion of a scad of my wealth yielded no response. The second letter was actually mailed back to me with my name and signature circled and ha ha written in red ink beside it. I hated using Ted’s pull, but he insisted, and so he wrote to them, introduced me, and slightly more than suggested that I could be talked into being loose with my dough. I got a call from a woman named Gladys Feet, and she wanted very much to buy me lunch. I agreed to meet her at a restaurant downtown.

I arrived at the restaurant first and sat at the table to wait, with my doubts. I had had to go around the barn, as my mother would have said, just to try to offer these folks money. I watched as the hostess pointed me out and saw the reaction on Gladys Feet’s face. Gladys Feet was an average-looking woman in all respects, dressed in an average navy blue business suit with a white blouse, but she wore extremely high stiletto heels. The heels made her look like an actor in a corporate porn film. She smiled as she approached and I stood. “Mr. Poitier,” she greeted me.

“Hello, Ms. Feet,” I said with a remarkably straight face.

She sat. She was a bit flustered. “I can’t get over how much you look like Sidney Poitier. A young Sidney Poitier.”

“More every day, it seems,” I said.

“So, let me first say how pleased we are to discover your interest in Morehouse. It’s so rewarding to me personally to meet interesting people wanting to contribute to the education of talented black men.”

Her speech put me off a bit, and as she slickly spouted the words I realized that my scads of money gave me a considerable amount of power. A seemingly simple notion, but one that I had either been too stupid to acknowledge or too stubborn to accept. I cut right to the heart of the matter. “Ms. Feet, I am a high school dropout. I want to go to college, and I’m willing to buy my way in.”

“I see. Well … ”

I interrupted her. “Three hundred thousand toward anything you need, no questions, no strings. If I flunk out, the money is still yours. If I quit, the money is still yours. If I receive the stellar education you advertise, well, just remember that I have a lot more money.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Gladys Feet said.

“Say I’ll be admitted in the fall.” I was speaking with a confidence that I didn’t quite recognize and certainly didn’t feel was justified. I was somewhat saddened by the knowledge that the confidence derived from my wealth or, more precisely, the awareness of my wealth.

“I don’t have the power to … ”

“Three hundred and twenty-five thousand.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Gladys Feet left the table, and I ordered another cola. And as promised she was back quickly, a smile on her face, smoothing her skirt before she sat.

“Welcome to Morehouse,” she said.