Percival Everett - I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“You’re rapidly becoming a boring fellow,” Everett said. “Have you had sex with her?”

“I believe that’s my business.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I really don’t think we should be talking about this,” I said. I looked out the window.

“Okay, okay, relax. Don’t get your no-doubt-patterned bloomers in a clove hitch.”

I drummed my fingers on my thigh, upset that I was not relaxed, but said, “I’m relaxed.”

“What about her parents? Are you nervous about meeting them?”

“Extremely.”

“Well, don’t tell that you’ve seen their baby naked. That’s my best piece of advice.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“And be yourself.”

“Who else would I be?”

“I don’t know. You might decide all of a sudden that you’re Sidney Poitier. You’re not, you know. Though you do look alarmingly like him. Tell me, whom do I look like?”

I looked over his facial features. His sad but alert brown eyes were too close to his face. His lips were strangely thin. His large nose looked like it had been broken several times. I could think of no one he resembled. “I don’t know many actors,” I finally said.

“What about Roscoe Lee Browne?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Come on, you know Roscoe Lee Browne. He was all over the television. Maybe he still is. He was in The Cowboys with John Wayne. I don’t much like John Wayne, but Roscoe Lee Browne was great. Anyway, you’d know him if you saw him,” he said. “I know you would. What about Bill Cosby?”

“You look nothing like Bill Cosby,” I said.

“Thank the lord,” Everett said, “if only there were such a thing. But seriously, you have to know that you look more like Sidney Poitier than Sidney Poitier ever did. Have you ever seen In the Heat of the Night ?”

“No.”

“A beautiful love story, that movie. Let me hear you say, ‘They call me Mr. Tibbs.’ ”

“They call me Mr. Tibbs,” I said.

“No, say it as if a crab is biting your ass, as if someone is peeling an unpleasant and undesired memory from your core, as if you’re feeling a little bitchy, as if you might be gay but even you don’t know.”

I said it again.

“Uncanny. You ever do drugs?”

I shook my head.

“Huh. That’s too bad, but hardly surprising.” He stood, looked out the window at a Spelman girl in a short skirt and then down at me. “Enjoy your break. And remember, be yourself. Unless you can think of someone better.”

Maggie and I could not manage seats together on the flight to Washington, and so I sat in 23B watching her head bob and turn in apparent bemusement and laughter with her neighbor in the nineteenth row, a guy who might have been an upperclassman at Morehouse, but I never found out. I couldn’t even find an escape in a nap on the relatively short flight because of the constant washroom trips of the woman in the window seat. About the fourth of five times she offered an apology in the form of a quick explanation by whispering, “UTI.” I didn’t know what she meant, but it sounded awful and I found complete and sudden compassion for her, even though she would not trade seats with me because she didn’t want to give up the window. And so I was in a bad mood when we landed at National Airport, though, as was my wont, I did not let on to Maggie. One might ask then what was the point of the bad mood, and I can only answer, the satisfaction of personal suffering.

The cab driver kept craning to glance back at me in his mirror. “I know you,” he said. “Are you from Nigeria?”

“No.”

“I know you. You look like that Sidney Poitier.”

“I hear that. Thank you.”

“You are not him, are you?”

“I’m not him, no.”

“Where are you from? You look Nigerian.”

“I’m from Los Angeles,” I said. Somehow that didn’t feel true. “That’s where I was born.”

From the taxi window Maggie pointed from the 14th Street Bridge out over the Potomac. “Do you know anything about boating?”

“I’ve sailed,” I said.

“Daddy will like that,” she said.

The house was large, a midsixties’ split-level with a three-car garage and an expanse of lawn that seemed somewhat ridiculous. The taxi left us out in the holly-hedge-lined driveway. I carried my bag and the heavier of Maggie’s two as I followed her past the beige Cadillac to a side porch where she unlocked the door. We stepped into an anteroom, what might have been called a mudroom in a farmhouse. It was a room that might have been bright and cheery if not for the heavy red drapes covering the windows on either side of the door. From that room I could see into the kitchen and beyond that into what I would learn later was the breakfast room. The walls were painted red, the tiled floor of the kitchen was red and white, the refrigerator and stove were red.

“My mother loves red,” Maggie said, almost as an apology. “So, this is it. Where I grew up.”

“Wow,” I said, not a big wow, but a polite one.

“Who is that in there?” a woman called from another room. “Could it be? Could it be? Is that my Maggie? My shaggy Maggie?” A woman in her midsixties came around the corner and hugged Maggie, then stepped back. “Lord, look at you, miss college girl. Still pretty. But don’t they feed you children down there?”

“Oh, Violet.”

“Don’t tell me. You lost weight.”

“Violet,” Maggie said. “This is Not Sidney.”

I put my hand out to shake, but it was left hanging there. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“Not Sidney goes to Morehouse.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

“He’s my boyfriend.”

“I see,” Violet said. “You have family here in Washington?”

“No, I don’t”

“Not Sidney will be staying with us,” Maggie said.

“I’ll make up the guest room, I suppose. And see if I can get another steak from the butcher.” She muttered to herself as she walked off. “Nobody tells me a damn thing around here. Guest.”

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Violet,” Maggie said.

“I got that much.”

“She’s been with us forever. She lives in the apartment downstairs.”

“Is she a relative?” I asked.

“No. She’s like family. She takes care of things. She cooks and cleans, stuff like that. She took care of my sister and me when we were little.”

“She’s the housekeeper,” I said. The word servant seemed more correct but less appropriate.

“No, she’s Violet.”

“She seems nice,” I lied. “She didn’t seem to know I was coming. Seemed kind of upset about it.”

“I guess I forgot to mention it.”

“Do your parents know I’m here?”

“Must have slipped my mind to tell them. But they won’t care. They’re going to be thrilled to meet you. They’re going to love you. Come on, let me show you the rest of the house.”

We left our bags in the foyer, and Maggie led me through the crimson-carpeted downstairs. The expanse of red was, if not disorienting, unsettling, and I found it difficult to take a step without staring down at it. In the dining room was a long, elaborately ornate table with an enormous arrangement of impossibly colored silk flowers in its center. The room was dark; the large windows were covered by Venetian blinds, which, though open, could only let in so much light past the white curtains and the red drapes, which were belted by gold cords. At the center of the coffee table that was as wide as the gold sofa was a collection of variously sized blown-glass swans filled with red-colored water.

“Like I said, my mother loves red.”