“Did you cry?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Did you break your nose more than once?”
“Yeah.”
“And you never cried?”
“Never.”
“What happened?” I had taken off my shirt and shorts, and he was scanning what he could see of my body, an athlete’s body, not like the bodies of other men my age he’d seen on the beach. He looked at my underwear, perhaps wondering why I’d stopped at them.
He grinned. “You’re naked.”
“No, I’m not,” I said sternly.
He tried mimicking my tone. “Yes, you are.”
“What are these?” I gestured to my boxers.
“The emperor has no clothes,” he sang.
“I’m not the emperor.”
C stopped grinning, sensing he shouldn’t take it any further.
“What happened?”
“When?”
“When you broke your nose.”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you break your nose all those times?”
“Sports and stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Sports.”
He squinted at me and curled his lips in. He fingered the shaving cream can again. His face went blank, as it always seemed to when he questioned and got no answer. I hid things from him. I always had. Perhaps I was a coward. C already seemed to know what was going to happen to him. Just as I had been watching him, he’d been watching me, making the calculations, extrapolating, charting the map of the territory that lay between us — little brown boy to big brown man.
He was already sick of it. He was sick of his extended family. He was sick of his private-school mates. He seemed world weary before the age of seven. His little friends had already made it clear to him that he was brown like poop or brown like dirt and that his father was ugly because he was brown. He was only four the first time he’d heard it and he kept silent as long as he could, but his mother had found him alone weeping. He’d begged us not to say anything to his teachers or the other children’s parents — they were his friends, he’d said. Claire wanted blood spilt. There were meetings and protests and petitions and apologies. People had gotten angry at the kids who’d ganged up on the little brown boy. One mother had dragged her wailing son to me, demanding that he apologize, and seemed perplexed when I noogied his head and told him it was okay. Other parents were even more perplexed when I refused to sign the petitions that would broaden the curriculum. Claire had been surprised.
“Why don’t you want to sign?”
“What good would it do?”
“What do you mean?”
“No institutional legislation can change the hearts of bigots and chickenshits.”
Bigots and chickenshits, my boy was surrounded by them, and no one would come clean and say it, not even me. They would all betray him at some point, some because they actually were the sons and daughters of bigots and would become so themselves, some because they would never stand by his side — unswervable. Which little chickenshit would stand up for him when they chanted, “Brown like poop, brown like dirt”? They would all be afraid to be his friend. Even at this age they knew what it was to go down with him — my little brown boy.
The Whites were coming. I had to be ready.
“Get ready,” I said. I sent my little brown boy out and took a shower.
As soon as I finished, C knocked on the door. It was as if he’d been waiting right outside.
“Yeah?”
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Wait.”
Noah had appeared naked before his son Ham, and Ham’s line was cursed forever. I didn’t want to start that mess again. I dressed quickly. I opened the door. My three children stood there: the brown boy, the white boy, and the girl of indeterminate race. They wore the confused look of children who’d just finished watching TV.
“She’s got a poop,” C said, pointing at his sister’s bottom, holding his nose.
“Yeah, poop,” said X.
“No poopoo,” said the girl. I scooped her up and smelled, then I peeked into her diaper.
“No poop.”
I got them dressed and presentable and lined up near the front door. I could hear Claire in the bathroom, fiddling with her mother’s makeup. She seldom wore anything besides lipstick. We heard the car pull onto the gravel driveway. C leaned toward the kitchen.
“Let’s go.”
“Wait until you’ve said hello.” Claire emerged from the bathroom. It looked as though the kids had shoved a golf ball up her nose and then set upon her sinus area with dark magic markers. Her children looked at her in horror, as though their mother had been replaced by some well-mannered pug.
C pulled on my arm. “Please.” He sounded desperate. He was looking at the door as though something evil was about to enter. The screen door whined and the knob turned and he bolted to the back. Edith walked in, saw her daughter, and gasped. She remembered she had company with her and turned to welcome them in.
The Whites were here: the grandmother, the daughter, the grandchildren, and the son-in-law. Edith held him by the wrist, squeezing it as though to reassure him. I don’t think Edith had ever touched me, other than by mistake — both reaching for the marmalade jar, both pulling back. Edith is still very beautiful. I think she’s a natural blonde. She has blue eyes, not lasers like X’s, but firm, giving strength to her diminutive self. Her skin is beach worn, permanently tanned from walks in the wind and sand. High cheekboned, long nosed, as if she was trying to assume the face of some long dead Peqout or Wampanoag. Massachusetts. I thought about the word, like a name, Massasoit, as though I was he, welcoming a visiting tribe from the south, the Narragansett.
The prelude to the introduction was taking too long. I offered my hand to my alleged peer. I’m six-three and have the hands of someone a foot taller. They are hard and marked by the miscues of a decade and a half of absentminded carpentry. His hand disappeared in mine, but he didn’t flinch. He did his best to meet me.
“Good to see you.” He let go, stepped back. The two women had joined Edith, staring at Claire’s nose.
“Hello,” said Claire to the elder, trying to break the spell. They stopped staring, but they couldn’t move. Claire hugged both of them, kissing the sides of their faces as well.
“It’s been so long,” she said to the younger. Claire is truly beautiful — in visage, in tone, in manner. She’s always had the ability, at least in the world she’s from, to make everything seem all right, to make people feel that things are in their proper place and all is well. It wasn’t working. As she held the younger’s hand, the elder surveyed the wreckage of miscegenation: the battered Brahmin jewel, the afro blonde in her arms, the brown man. What was there to say other than hello and good-bye? The elder looked from Edith to Claire to the girl to me. Her eyes darted faster and faster. For a moment I wanted to explain, begin the narrative simply because I believed I could and I knew she couldn’t: Milton Brown of Georgia raped the slave girl Minette. That boy-child escaped and was taken in by the Cherokee peoples on their forced march to Oklahoma.
Claire knelt to address the children — two boys, perhaps three and five. They were both hiding behind their mother’s legs. The younger bent down and pushed her sons in front of her. They couldn’t look at Claire. They buried their faces into their mother’s skirt.
“And who is this?” asked the younger, looking at X. “Oh, my goodness — those eyes!” She gasped, forgetting herself, forgetting her children. It was as if X really was reptilian and she’d fallen under his hypnotic spell. The White children, against their better judgment, turned as well. They looked as though they’d been bled, particularly next to X, who seemed ready to jump, howl, or sprint. He stared back at them, not with the fear and wonder with which they regarded him, but in an equally inappropriate way, as though he was a boy looking at cupcakes, or a carnivore looking at flesh — child-eyed, man-jawed. If there was to be a battle, it was obvious who would be left when everything shook down. The new world regarded the old world. The old world clung to its mother’s legs.