Percival Everett - I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Everyone stood to applaud. I didn’t know why. However, I saw it as an opportunity to get up off the filthy floor. Morris Chesney kicked me when I started to rise.

“Did Big Brother Morris tell you that you could get up?”

“No, Big Brother Morris.”

“Then keep your sorry ass down there on that floor.”

I looked down past the row of trousered legs to my right to see the filthy red T-shirt of another pledger, the smallest and meekest of us, Eugene Talbert. He was seated on the floor as well. I realized that though he was eight inches shorter than me, we were the same size.

I wouldn’t say that I had custodial, protective, or even particularly warm feelings for Eugene Talbert, but I wouldn’t say a lot of things that are true. He lived in DuBois Hall with many other freshmen, so I didn’t see him except for shared hours of humiliation and torture at the hands of the Big Brothers. He was from New Jersey, I knew that much. I also knew that he was a chemistry major with little or no interest in chemistry. He wanted to be an Omega as his father was an Omega, as his uncle was an Omega, as his brother was an Omega. They were all chemists and loved chemistry and worked in labs making flavor additives and enhancers for the fast-food industry. They were all tall. Small Eugene told me all of this while we stood side by side with pails of sand suspended up and away from our bodies. We were standing in a room with maroon, flocked wallpaper cleared of furniture while the Big Brothers watched a Spike Lee film in an adjacent room. Eugene was sweating profusely; his eyes were starting to roll back into his head. I told him to take deep breaths, to try to get into a zone, to visualize something peaceful, quiet, a place he loved, which was all bullshit. I was still holding my load up because I was stronger than the little guy. He collapsed and Big Brothers Morris and Maurice came slowly walking in, heads bobbing or nodding, I didn’t know the difference. They laid into Eugene without pause.

“Goddamn! What the fizzy fuck is wrong with you, EUgene?!” Morris shouted or maybe Maurice did; it didn’t matter which one. That was how they said his name, EUgene.

“I think little EUgene here thinks we just give instructions to smell our own breath!”

“Thinks we’re kidding!” The Big Brothers had a habit of echoing each other.

“Seems he thinks we didn’t mean for him to keep the pails in the motherfucking air! What should we do to you, you little maggot?!”

“What should we do?!”

“I don’t know, Big Brothers!” Eugene barked out.

“Do you really want to be an Omega, EU-fucking-gene?”

“Yes, Big Brother!”

“Then, tell me, you tiny worm, why did you drop those pails, the ones we told you to keep in the air?”

“My arms got tired, Big Brother.”

“His arms got tired.”

“Your daddy’s an Omega, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Big Brother!”

“But you don’t really want to be one.”

“Yes, I do, Big Brother!”

“No, you don’t!”

“I do, Big Brother!”

“You’d do anything to be an Omega?”

“Anything, Big Brother!”

“Would you let Big Brother Maurice punch you in the face as hard as he can with a fist full of quarters?”

“Yes, Big Brother!”

I stood there like an idiot holding up my pails of sand, watching them do that to little Eugene, watching them break him down. I hated myself for watching, for continuing to hold my load, for simply being there. When Maurice punched the small man my stomach turned, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. I watched the blood gush from Eugene’s nose and though my strength didn’t fail, my pails did lower. I concentrated my stare at Morris, one brow jacked up, leaning into it. Maurice was rubbing his knuckles, looking orgasmic after his blow, and Eugene was crumpled into a ball, blood from his nose everywhere. Morris caught me staring and opened his mouth to say something, but he turned out to be the most susceptible subject I had yet to encounter. I Fesmerized him so quickly that I was uncertain how to proceed. But his eyes glazed over in the textbook manner. Inside his head, he had fallen back on his heels and was awaiting my instructions.

I leaned close and whispered so only he could hear. I said, “Dismiss us and meet me in our room.”

He let us go. The befuddled Maurice said, I believe, “What?”

I didn’t say anything to Morris that evening. I just let him wander about the room in his haze.

I went to Everett’s class the following morning at eight, in my filthy red T-shirt and with red eyes. He didn’t bleat as he walked by my chair that morning, but walked about the room, his eyes closed as much as open, playing with a stick of chalk. He delivered his lecture like that, as if talking to himself, but not.

“I suppose what we’re talking about in this class is art. If it’s not, then I’m lost, but of course I’m lost anyway. At least I’ve been lost before and it looks just like this. Let’s consider art as a kind of desacralization, perhaps a sort of epistemological discontinuity that is undoubtedly connected or at the very least traceable to an amalgam of very common yet highly unusual sociohistorical factors. In this, the end of our rapid expansion into mass-media pop-industrial urbanization, all of which changes daily, not only in and out of itself, but transforms the texture and the intertexture of daily life and discourse, we find the degree of expansion or unfolding modified and tested by the parallel distension and unfurling of moral and ideological attitudes, even those and perhaps especially those of religion and traditional repositories of the so-called and so-seen sacred.”

The students looked at each other, shrugging, scared, frantically trying to carve out something to stick in their notes. I knew that he was uttering gibberish, but what wasn’t clear was whether he knew it. I don’t think he did. There was no snide, sidelong glance at me or anyone or even an imagined mirror. It was just his voice attached to his head. He droned on like that for nearly twenty more minutes, until finally I raised my hand. I was, after all, paying considerably more than anyone else for this so-called, so-seen education.

“What does this have to do with nonsense?” I asked, grasping the levels of my question as I asked it.

“Precisely,” he said. Then he looked at his watch. “It shouldn’t matter where you are, the cat’s in the kitchen, the dog’s in the car. There’s an elephant singing plinkidee czar, and the old man is strumming the same old guitar.” He looked out the window. “Dismissed.”

I walked out with my classmates and listened to their awe. “He’s brilliant,” one Spelman woman said. “I wish I knew what he was talking about,” from another. “He’d be cute if he weren’t so fat,” the third and last woman of the class said. A couple of upperclassmen seemed equally impressed. I then began to doubt myself and decided to stop by Everett’s office to see if I could be made to understand.

And so I did, around lunchtime again, and on this occasion I found him napping over an open book in his lap. I knocked on the doorjamb.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Mr. Poitier.”

“Hello, professor.”

“What can I do for you?”

I sat in the chair next to his desk. “I didn’t understand a word of your lecture today.”

“What are you, stupid?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“I don’t think so either,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Poitier, I’m going to hip you to the truth. I’m a fraud, a fake, a sham, a charlatan, a deceiver, a pretender, a crook.”

“You mean, it’s all meaningless?”