Sports taught us a lot as young southern men, mostly how to hurt each other in exchange for the praise of our fathers. I would eventually possess the skill to play one or two sports at the college level, or at least the barber college level, but I had a condition that kept me from excelling as much as I would have liked, what psychologists call “large buttocks,” which led to “chafing,” which led to “depression.”
I was better at baseball than any of the other sports we tried, due to the great deal of standing around doing nothing. My greatest skill was insulting players from the other teams, which, in Mississippi, was considered a necessary baseball strategy. I might not be able to run faster or hit harder than you, but I could say things about your mother that would make you want to shove your bat up my rectum, which was one way to distract you from hitting the ball.
Some players, their insults were just silly:
“Hey, batter, batter!”
“We need a pitcher, not a glass of water!”
“Nice swing!”
I felt my contributions should be more original, so I tried a fresher invective, focusing on how their moms smelled like Doritos and how their girlfriends probably looked like walruses, and my teammates thought it was hilarious because it often distracted the batters and runners and such, but then I would look in the bleachers and see their girlfriends and would feel a little sadness because sometimes they actually did look like walruses.
That was the price of winning, I guess. We needed to win. We did what it took. Sport has always been an important part of southern life, along with other beloved traditions, such as quilting and racism. Racism, we were especially great at that, too.
Satan created the niggers,” I heard a man say on TV one day, during some sort of parade. He wore what appeared to be a heavy white caftan and a large conical hat, also of white. “And the Lord Jesus Christ created the whites!” the confused man said.
“Is that true?” I said, looking to both my parents for an answer.
“Absolutely not,” Mom said. “Nobody in this family’s racist.”
We heard the word nigger a lot, but not as much as the flags in our house might have suggested. Pop was not all nigger this and nigger that. We knew: This word was dangerous. If you said it up in Jackson, it might get you shot. If you said it out here in the country, it might make somebody think you’d had sex with your sister. Mostly, the word was used by old people suffering from dementia and young men suffering from mullets, the sort of men who believed in protecting their heritage and defending a noble agrarian ethos so that one day their children’s children could wear a Confederate flag bikini down at the lake while listening to Iron Maiden and smoking a joint the size of a grain silo.
I almost never heard Pop use the word, but that didn’t mean he was in love with African Americans as a people.
“The blacks are ruining this country,” he and other family members might say.
Or, “The blacks are ruining this town.”
Or, “The blacks are ruining this movie.”
All this ruining of things, I thought, must take a lot of work. I started to imagine all sorts of things the blacks could be ruining: railroads, salads, tariff legislation.
“Fucking and killing, fucking and killing,” a man had said at the deer camp one day. “It’s they goddamn way of life.”
I knew God had made black people, the same way he’d made clouds and hammerhead sharks, and there didn’t seem to be anything in scripture about not liking them, so I was confused.
“Why do we hate black people?” I asked Mom.
“We don’t hate them.”
“Do we like them?”
“Yes, we love everyone,” Mom said. “It’s just complicated down here.”
At school, it was difficult to see exactly what the black people were ruining. I looked closely. They were so much like white children, having most of their arms and legs and the correct number of eyes and eyebrows and so forth. There were subtle differences. Words, for example. What I called an aunt, they called an auntie, and what I called fat they called stout, but then so did some of the whites. The boys were Willie and Bobby and Marcus, easy enough, but the girls had names like Toshica and Lachunda, which sounded like the names of Japanese motorcycles or distant rivers in tribal lands.
When our school cafeteria served chicken, many of my black classmates expressed a clear preference for dark meat and also dark milk, which they called chocolate, as did we, which seemed fine. Occasionally, this one black kid would take his carton of chocolate milk and just pry the whole thing open, making a little square bowl of it, and then take the dry cornbread muffin we’d all been given and drop it into the milk and pulverize it with a fork and then eat it, which did not make me want to hate him or his people, but did make me want to stop eating for a couple of weeks, so I guess the only thing I ever actually saw a black person ruin was my appetite.
In my daily life, it appeared that black people and white people got along fine. At school, we ate at the same tables, refreshed ourselves at the same fountains, relieved our bladders in the same troughs, where we enjoyed a special brotherhood experienced only by those whose jets of urine had commingled. We knew instinctively that all of us were alike on the inside, that the only true test of a man’s character was the muscular strength of his urethra.
Then I learned what people outside our state thought of us.
“They’re making a movie about Mississippi!” somebody would say.
And the movie stars would visit and they’d eat and it’d be great fun until the movie came out and we saw that they believed things about us that couldn’t be true, like how all of us talked like Foghorn Leghorn and the state lacked even a single building with effective air-conditioning. We’d watch NBC Nightly News and get very excited when we heard Tom Brokaw say something about us. Sometimes it’d be a story about how poor we all were, or how dumb we all were, but it usually had something to do with how racist we all were. The message was clear: If anyone was ruining anything, it was the white people.
This one time, on the bus, a black girl gave me a love note.
“You got a nice butt,” the note said. “Big and round.”
It had never occurred to me that my buttocks could be an object of beauty. Did people from Up North know such things could happen in our state? Why couldn’t they make movies about these sorts of things, and not church bombings? Could my buttocks truly be the catalyst for racial healing?
I approached her, sat down. Her name was Shalanda, a name that had long fascinated me, so I decided to start with that.
“I like your name,” I said. “It sounds like the name of a river in a fairy-tale land.”
“A fairy-tale who?” she said.
“Like with elves.”
“Elves? What you talking bout, elves?”
“Mythical creatures.”
“I ain’t no creature. Seem like you the creature.”
She was very angry to have written such a flattering note. I sat down. And I kept sitting down, this time next to solitary black boys in cafeterias. Mostly they stared at their food. I had so many questions. Had they experienced prejudicial cruelty in my new homeland? Did they shoulder the weight of histories I did not understand? What was their position on the appropriate size of buttocks? Mine, for example?
I was usually a pretty good talker, but these boys, they had no interest. I decided they must have been able to detect the radiating fumes of racism emitting from my clothes and hair, the lingering odors of home. I wanted to build a bridge across this gulf of injustice, but they were sphinxes to a man, closed off: riddles, wrapped in enigmas, stuffed inside a carton of chocolate milk.
And then I met Tom.
We hit it off immediately. We liked the same movies, the same breakfast foods.
“You like Pop-Tarts?” I said.
“I eat them every day,” he said.
“That’s amazing.”
He was the first black boy I’d ever heard say things like “wow” and “indeed,” which may sound strange to people from progressive places where white people and black people all sound like they work at American Apparel, but in Mississippi, it was no small miracle, like Dorothy meeting a Munchkin who also sang songs about rainbows.
“Can Tom spend the night?” I asked Pop.
I’d probably had a dozen different friends over at some point or other. Pop almost always said yes. He knew a boy needed friends. But this time, he sort of looked at me funny, then away.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
“But he’s got braces!” I said.
What was crazy was, Pop didn’t walk away. He seemed at least willing to engage. The drawbridge of the fortress of his soul came down. It might not happen again for a thousand years. I accepted the offer and leapt over the moat.
I launched a barrage of moral confusion and outrage, all these feelings about race and class and Christian love. I recited scripture, delivered a homily. He was the one who took me to church. If he didn’t like what I was saying, it was his fault.
He said nothing.
He stood there. He thought. It was painful, watching him think, forcing him to do something so unnatural. He made a face, as though he were passing a kidney stone.
“The thing is, son, blacks is different.”
“But Moses was married to an African,” I said, proudly, righteously.
I’d read something about this in a Bible tract, about Moses being married to an Ethiopian, or maybe it was an Etruscan, or an Ecuadorian. Point was, this celebrated Jew, who we were led to believe was also an upstanding Christian, had a thing for brown women.
“Moses can marry whoever the hell ever he wants to,” he said, “but ain’t no black boy spending the night in this house.”
I didn’t get it: Pop was Tom’s coach. Why was it okay to coach a kid, but not let your boy be friends with the same kid? He jabbed a finger at me, hard. The message was clear: Stay away from the black boys, and stay away from his finger, which might be loaded. I stormed off, and that was it. The drawbridge was raised, the fortress forever closed.
I’d like to say I got angry, that I burned my Ole Miss Rebels flags and finery in a righteous bonfire in the pasture, replaced them with posters of N.W.A and Public Enemy, and announced my plans to marry a girl like the girl who married dear old Moses, but none of that happened. All that happened was, I was sad.
Mom was right. It was complicated.
Tom and I grew distant, as friends who aren’t allowed to be friends often will, and that baseball season ended in a hot, pitiful denouement.
Mr. Brokaw had been right.
“Your father just comes from a different time,” Mom said, as though Pop had recently been thawed from Paleolithic ice and was now wandering the backyard hunting woolly mammoths with a rock. And then suddenly, the next baseball season, he evolved.
Let’s take a ride,” he said.
It was a Friday, early spring. I climbed into the Caprice Classic next to him.
On the dash he pitched a copy of Sports Illustrated, turned to the “Faces in the Crowd” section, a monthly lineup of amateur athletic talent from around the nation, including one Roberto Ventura, a young black man from a strange institution up the road: the Piney Woods Country Life School. We knew it simply as Piney Woods, a historically black boarding school for students from places like the Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands who’d been sent to the American South for some unknown purpose.
Ventura had thrown five no-hitters in a row for Piney Woods and owned a fastball that made white men construct idols in their hearts.
“There’s more where he come from,” Pop said.
On the way there, he told me what he knew about the school, that it was mostly orphans and fatherless children, some left on doorsteps, others snatched from the unforgiving maw of juvenile detention centers across the crystalline waters farther south, which may or may not have been true, but that’s what he’d heard, and that’s what he believed.
“Them boys deserve a baseball team much as anybody,” Pop said.
These fatherless children, many of whom weren’t actually fatherless, I would later learn, were black, right? Was Pop suddenly overcome by kindness? Was he on some sort of a drug that caused unhealthy inflammation of the conscience? What would practice be like? Would he accidentally go calling one a nigger? And if so, would I be forced to beat him to death with one of the good Easton bats, or would the players beat me to it?
Our first practice took place at Burnham Field, a wedge of turf scratched out of a weedy plateau of farmland in what looked like the perfect location to burn a pile of bodies. Pop and I got the field ready, moved the livestock off the outfield, drew baselines with bags of lime, and waited for our new team to arrive. Across the road, high on a hill, a horsehead gas well nodded up and down, blessing our efforts.
The Piney Woods van pulled up, deposited several skinny black boys, and a few very large ones, and drove away. They must have been worried, traveling from their Arcadian grounds to this godforsaken field, full of rat snakes. They looked around casually, but warily, as though they might be marched to a ravine and shot.
“You can call me Coach Key,” Pop said.
They just stared.
Pop handed out a few leathery mitts, but the recruits quickly tossed them aside and produced some sort of large orb and began to kick it.
“What are they doing?” Pop asked me.
“Playing some kind of game,” I said.
“It’s the queerest thing I ever saw.”
“I think it’s called soccer,” I said. “I saw it in a movie.”
Their names were Clive and Ricardo and Philip and more, and they came from faraway lands like Trinidad and Chicago. They were of many colors, with blue and brown and bright green eyes and some even with hair the color of spun gold, and they spoke a West Indian vernacular both alluring and alien, stacked with blank verse and rhyming couplets and what seemed like nonsense words. I’d experienced this confusion once before when a Scot had visited our church: I understood nothing she said, but hadn’t let that stop me from asking her questions, so I could misunderstand her even more, which I found pleasurable. This was how my teammates from Piney Woods sounded, somewhere between that Scot and Bob Marley.
“The batty booty moody fruity,” one might say.
“Ah, it do! If the lickety rickety stick to the trickety dick.”
“And the moody fruity don’t bippety boppity.”
“The lady got some grady.”
“Dat’s for shady!”
“You know it.”
“I do.”
“Ha ha!”
I very much longed to join in this fun dialogue about the moody fruity and the shady grady lady, so I acted like I knew what in the hell they were talking about. They’d be warming up, tossing the ball, and I’d work my way into the polygon of throwing.
“Dee elephant say the ball boy.”
“The toy in the backside.”
“Dem latrine the backside.”
“Dis for true!”
Everyone would laugh, and so I would laugh, as though I understood this story about the elephant and the latrine, and they would look at one another and laugh harder, and so I would laugh harder, and would realize they were laughing at me, and that perhaps I was the elephant in this scenario.
On the first day of practice, it was clear who their leader was: Michael, from St. Thomas. Pop called Michael to the mound to get a look at his fastball.
“Gimme dat ball, see,” Michael said, taking the smudgy orb from Pop’s hand. I squatted down behind the plate, to catch. Michael laughed in my general direction.
“Looka here,” Pop said. “What’s so funny?”
“Ya boy’s funny,” Michael said.
“What’s funny about me?” I said.
“He got them lodge flaps on his head, like he would fly away.”
My ears. They were laughing at my ears. They were big, wide and fleshy and pink, like rare and precious tropical flowers, but Pop said nothing, and I decided not to be offended.
“Ready when you are,” I said, squatting behind the plate.
This was why we were here, to see which of them could pitch like Roberto Ventura, who had already been drafted by the Cubs.
Michael wound up, released the ball, and we watched it fly over the visitors’ dugout. The second and third pitches flew in the opposite direction, sailing into the parking area, so far off course that Michael seemed to believe the pitcher’s job was to win the game by hiding all the balls. Our best hope was that he would be able to injure most of the opposing team’s batters and we could win by forfeit, while our opponents were on their way to the hospital.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said to Michael. “You got a good arm.”
“Dontcha think I know dat, Dumbo?” he said.
I wanted to say something about his meaty nose, as wide and ridiculous as my ears, but did not, for one does not build a dream on slander, even I knew that. I wasn’t afraid of him, really, even though he seemed to hold some secret rage. If we got in a fight, I figured any punches he threw were more likely to hit someone very far away.
In subsequent practices, Michael called me many things: Dumbo and Ears and Lodge Boy and Squash Head and other names that made me sound like a mentally handicapped cartoon character.
“Hey, Captain Batty,” Michael said. “Ya walk funny.”
“Batty?” I said. “What does that even mean?”
“Butt. Ya butt. Ya batty. Ya got a big batty like a lady fatty maddy paddy daddy.”
“What about my butt looks like a woman’s butt?” I said.
He demonstrated, walking funny. Everyone laughed, even the nice ones.
Nigger-lover!” Pop said.
“No,” Mom said. “Really?”
I stood in the hallway, listening. The story was this: The coaches had scheduled a meeting to discuss the upcoming season and schedule. Pop had arrived a few minutes late and as he entered, he explained to Mom he had heard another coach refer to him as a “nigger-lover.”
“What’d you do?” Mom said.
“I about whipped his ass.”
“Well,” Mom said, “I’ve heard you say that word many times.”
“Yeah, but it’s different,” he said. “It’s some that is and some that ain’t.”
“And which is which?” she asked. “Who decides?”
He had no answer.
In the days leading up to that first game, he showed those Piney Woods boys how to swing and throw and catch and steal, how to blouse their uniform pants, how to slide, how to wear their baseball caps like real men, high on the head, placed there gingerly, like a cake-topper. He seemed to take real joy in it, picking up the team from their beautiful campus, speaking to them in coarsely affectionate tones, the way good fathers will. They took to him, and he to them, and it forced me to reconsider this man, who had seemed so simple, and now seemed so complicated.
My father, a lover of Negroes.
At every opportunity, every practice, he scuttled me to the back of the line at the batting cage, at the water spigot.
“But Pop—”
“Don’t backtalk me, boy.”
This got the others riled up. They liked seeing him scold me.
I tried not to get too angry with Pop, even though he had me carry the equipment to and from the truck while the others showered themselves in Gatorade and chatted in their pidgin with my father, who apparently could understand them just fine.
“You da flew in the merry on the jerry berry.”
“It’s all in the wrists, son,” Pop said.
“Is da weet fleet.”
“Ha ha,” said Pop.
“And beans in ya head boy.”
“If you all win, then yeah, we might do that.”
Pop coached us with great fury, his eyes glinting with righteous vengeance, chewing his gum wildly, eager to whip someone’s ass in the cause of equality. He even brought the boys home, fed them, let them watch our television.
What had happened? How had we gotten here?
Michael was now able to aim directly at the batter’s heads, and we were ready to play. At that first game, the opposing parents didn’t try to lynch anybody, mesmerized as they were by the curious language our team used.
“Reckon it’s English?” I heard someone say.
“I swear if it don’t sound like Spanish.”
“Hell, they ain’t got blacks in Mexico.”
“Shit, they got ’em everywhere.”
We won that first game, mostly as a result of the other team’s batters refusing to stand closer than ten feet from the plate.
But I still hadn’t won their affections, which I needed very badly, like so many white people before and since.
Why did they hate me so? They hung about dugouts in a loose cloud, their jocular chatter forming a protective barrier from those seeking brotherhood. Every now and then, when the game forced them to recognize my existence, they included me in their jeering, reciting poetry about my disgusting white body, but I was not invited to retort.
And then one day, I decided I would. After all, insults were my gift, too.
Specifically, what I decided to do was make fun of one or perhaps even several of them, as a way of showing our shared love of humiliating others. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? These Piney Woods boys, I knew, would love it. They weren’t making fun of me. They were asking me to be their friend. To make fun of them.
All I needed to do was think of some way to insult one of them. They would love it, and laugh, and teach me their secret language and handshake, just in time for the season’s final crowning moment, the team pool party, when we would laugh and attempt to drown one another in racial harmony.
That moment came, though not at the pool party, but at one of our last games, dusk settling on Burnham Field. Michael was inside the dugout, making merry, Don Rickles at the Friars Club.
“Potty feece, potty feece, it no boy in the duty truck tooti fruiti!” he was saying, or something like that. I stood on the other side of the cyclone fence swinging a bat, warming up, ready to play.
“Da way dee chirrens be tinking!” Michael said.
More laughter. This was my moment.
“Hey, man,” I said, my old swagger back.
Michael turned. “What you wan, boy?”
I could feel the tide of history heave and hold its mighty breath.
“Your mom—” I said.
“My who?” he said.
“Your mom—”
His eyeballs grew, expanding marshmallows in the angry microwave of his face.
“What you say, boy?” Michael said. Suddenly, I could understand him, and the violence in his eyes. My mind evacuated and my bowels alerted me of a very similar plan. And I could not remember the end of the joke.
“Your mom, she’s just—fat,” I said. “Just very, very, very fat. Ha ha.”
I am guessing, by the way Michael attacked the fence between us with an aluminum bat, that he must have loved his mother very much. Someone wrenched the weapon away from him, held his arms. I don’t remember exactly what he said, only that it had something to do with pulling off my genitals and putting them somewhere inconvenient.
“What’s the ruckus?” Pop said, running over. I held the bat in a defensive position, preparing to bunt my way to safety. Michael threw himself to the ground, wailing.
“His mama dead,” one of the others said, while Michael cried.
“Yeah, okay!” I said, still holding my bat, not really believing them. “Ha ha.”
I waited for Michael to get up and start laughing and maybe hug me and make me an honorary black person, and I waited, and I am still waiting. Turns out, she really was dead. Drowned, they said, when he was a baby.
There would be no pool party, and no triumphant moment of festive We Are All of the Human Race togetherness. It was just Michael, weeping for his dead mother, and me, the white devil, standing over him with a bat.
The last time I was in Mississippi, I beheld many wondrous things.
Black boys, riding horses, carrying shotguns. A white man, in a real Honest Abe stovepipe hat and a black frock coat, decrying Obamacare, and looking really dapper, and also insane. Trailers featuring great big Confederate flags hanging like kerchiefs in the tired light of an afternoon. Cafés with at least four different colors of people, holding hands and praying aloud for anyone to hear, people the color of chocolate and plantains and yams.
And I saw a black woman driving a nice European sedan with a bumper sticker that read: “Remember Freedom Summer.”
And I remembered my own freedom summer.
What is there to say about it? It was little league, not a Disney movie. We won some, lost most. There were no riots. But we did see heads wag. And I heard things I won’t forget.
“Nigger-lover,” I heard them say of my father.
He did a fine job, as fine as could be done with children who had been taught their whole lives that using your hands was a penalty. He’d done what he set out to do. He’d coached a baseball team.
In the years that followed, Pop continued to evolve. It was no fairy tale, of course. He did not start sending checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. But he did join a church with a black deacon and more than one black family, which is about as close to a miracle as I’ve ever seen, and he and my mother even went to a black church for a black wedding, a fact resulting from their having something resembling black friends, and he even moved to a neighborhood in town where black people were reported to live.
“It’s some blacks here,” said Pop. “But they all right.”
“Good,” I said. “I would hate to see you join one of their gangs.”
He smiled, but did not laugh.
And he coached more black teams, and helped many of those boys in other unheralded ways. He’d had his issues with black skin, but was drawn inexorably toward boys with no fathers, black and white, a gravitational pull stronger than history.
“Your father has changed a lot,” Mom said, when I walked into the living room a few years ago to find Pop sitting in his recliner, holding a small black child in pajamas.
“This here’s my friend,” Pop said.
“We’re babysitting for some neighbors,” Mom said.
The South is a strange place, one that can’t be fit inside a movie, a place that dares you to simplify it, like a prime number, like a Bible story, like my father.