Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Girls, girls,” said our parent helper, Mrs. Hedy. Mrs. Hedy was Octavia’s mother. She wagged her index finger perfunctorily, like a windshield wiper. “Stop it now. Be good.” She said this loudly enough to be heard, but lazily, nasally, bereft of any feeling or indication that she meant to be obeyed, as though she would say these words again at the exact same pitch if a button somewhere on her were pressed.

But the girls didn’t stop laughing; they only laughed louder. It was the word “Caucasian” that had got them all going. One day at school, about a month before the Brownie camping trip, Arnetta had turned to a boy wearing impossibly high-ankled floodwater jeans, and said, “What are you? Caucasian ?” The word took off from there, and soon everything was Caucasian. If you ate too fast, you ate like a Caucasian; if you ate too slow, you ate like a Caucasian. The biggest feat anyone at Woodrow Wilson could do was to jump off the swing in midair, at the highest point in its arc, and if you fell (like I had, more than once) instead of landing on your feet, knees bent Olympic-gymnast-style, Arnetta and Octavia were prepared to comment. They’d look at each other with the silence of passengers who’d narrowly escaped an accident, then nod their heads, and whisper with solemn horror and haughtiness, “Caucasian.”

Even the only white kid in our school, Dennis, got in on the Caucasian act. That time when Martez stuck the pencil in the socket, Dennis had pointed, and yelled, “That was so Caucasian!”

Living in the south suburbs of Atlanta, it was easy to forget about whites. Whites were like those baby pigeons: real and existing, but rarely thought about. Everyone had been to Rich’s to go clothes shopping, everyone had seen white girls and their mothers coo-cooing over dresses; everyone had gone to the downtown library and seen white businessmen swish by importantly, wrists flexed in front of them to check the time on their watches as though they would change from Clark Kent into Superman any second. But those images were as fleeting as cards shuffled in a deck, whereas the ten white girls behind us— invaders , Arnetta would later call them — were instantly real and memorable, with their long shampoo-commercial hair, as straight as spaghetti from the box. This alone was reason for envy and hatred. The only black girl most of us had ever seen with hair that long was Octavia, whose hair hung past her butt like a Hawaiian hula dancer’s. The sight of Octavia’s mane prompted other girls to listen to her reverentially, as though whatever she had to say would somehow activate their own follicles. For example, when, on the first day of camp, Octavia made as if to speak, a silence began. “Nobody,” Octavia said, “calls us niggers.”

At the end of that first day, when half of our troop made its way back to the cabin after tag-team restroom visits, Arnetta said she’d heard one of the girls in Troop 909 call Daphne a nigger. The other half of the girls and I were helping Mrs. Margolin clean up the pots and pans from the ravioli dinner. When we made our way to the restrooms to wash up and brush our teeth, we met up with Arnetta midway.

“Man, I completely heard the girl,” Arnetta reported. “Right, Daphne?”

Daphne hardly ever spoke, but when she did her voice was petite and tinkly, the voice one might expect from a shiny new earring. She’d written a poem once, for Langston Hughes Day, a poem brimming with all the teacher-winning ingredients — trees and oceans, sunsets and moons — but what cinched the poem for the grown-ups, snatching the win from Octavia’s musical ode to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, were Daphne’s last lines:

You are my father, the veteran

When you cry in the dark

It rains and rains and rains in my heart

She’d worn clean, though faded, jumpers and dresses when Chic jeans were the fashion, but when she went up to the dais to receive her prize journal, pages trimmed in gold, she wore a new dress with a velveteen bodice and a taffeta skirt as wide as an umbrella. All the kids clapped, though none of them understood the poem. I’d read encyclopedias the way others read comics, and I didn’t get it. But those last lines pricked me, they were so eerie, and as my father and I ate cereal, I’d whisper over my Froot Loops, like a mantra, “You are my father, the veteran. You are my father, the veteran, the veteran, the veteran,” until my father, who acted in plays as Caliban and Othello and was not a veteran, marched me up to my teacher one morning, and said, “Can you tell me what the hell’s wrong with this kid?”

I had thought Daphne and I might become friends, but she seemed to grow spooked by me whispering those lines to her, begging her to tell me what they meant, and I had soon understood that two quiet people like us were better off quiet alone.

“Daphne? Didn’t you hear them call you a nigger?” Arnetta asked, giving Daphne a nudge.

The sun was setting through the trees, and their leafy tops formed a canopy of black lace for the flame of the sun to pass through. Daphne shrugged her shoulders at first, then slowly nodded her head when Arnetta gave her a hard look.

Twenty minutes later, when my restroom group returned to the cabin, Arnetta was still talking about Troop 909. My restroom group had passed by some of the 909 girls. For the most part, they had deferred to us, waving us into the restrooms, letting us go even though they’d gotten there first.

We’d seen them, but from afar, never within their orbit enough to see whether their faces were the way all white girls appeared on TV — ponytailed and full of energy, bubbling over with love and money. All I could see was that some rapidly fanned their faces with their hands, though the heat of the day had long passed. A few seemed to be lolling their heads in slow circles, half-purposefully, as if exercising the muscles of their necks, half-ecstatically, rolling their heads about like Stevie Wonder.

“We can’t let them get away with that,” Arnetta said, dropping her voice to a laryngitic whisper. “We can’t let them get away with calling us niggers. I say we teach them a lesson.” She sat down cross-legged on a sleeping bag, an embittered Buddha, eyes glimmering acrylic black. “We can’t go telling Mrs. Margolin, either. Mrs. Margolin’ll say something about doing unto others and the path of righteousness and all. Forget that shit.” She let her eyes flutter irreverently till they half closed, as though ignoring an insult not worth returning. We could all hear Mrs. Margolin outside, gathering the last of the metal campware.

Nobody said anything for a while. Arnetta’s tone had an upholstered confidence that was somehow both regal and vulgar at once. It demanded a few moments of silence in its wake, like the ringing of a church bell or the playing of taps. Sometimes Octavia would ditto or dissent whatever Arnetta had said, and this was the signal that others could speak. But this time Octavia just swirled a long cord of hair into pretzel shapes.

“Well?” Arnetta said. She looked as if she had discerned the hidden severity of the situation and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Everyone looked from Arnetta to Daphne. It was, after all, Daphne who had supposedly been called the name, but Daphne sat on the bare cabin floor, flipping through the pages of the Girl Scout handbook, eyebrows arched in mock wonder, as if the handbook were a catalogue full of bright and startling foreign costumes. Janice broke the silence. She clapped her hands to broach her idea of a plan.

“They gone be sleeping,” she whispered conspiratorially, “then we gone sneak into they cabin, then we gone put daddy longlegs in they sleeping bags. Then they’ll wake up. Then we gone beat ’em up till they flat as frying pans!” She jammed her fist into the palm of her hand, then made a sizzling sound.