2. Give My Regards to Clark, Poindexter

Larry Dunn was the king of the kindergarten to fourth grade where I went to school at Clark Elementary. He was king because he was a lot older than anyone else and twice as strong as the rest of us. He was stronger because he was almost full grown and he’d flunked some grade two or three times.

He was the third-oldest kid at Clark. The only ones older than him and stronger than him were Byron and Buphead, who were in the sixth grade and who’d also flunked some grade at least once, we weren’t sure because it was something that Momma and Dad didn’t talk about.

Larry Dunn was king of the kindergarten to fourth grade only because Byron didn’t care about them. Larry was the king of Clark . . . but Byron was a god.

It seemed like that would make me a prince or a real strong angel or something but it didn’t work that way, I was just another fourth-grade punk. I guess having the school’s god as my brother did give me some kind of special rights but not a whole bunch. It helped me with stupid stuff like the time I found a dollar bill and got too excited and was crazy enough to show it to Larry Dunn. I knew this was a big mistake about a second before he stuck his hand out and said, “Lemme see it.” What could I do?

“Kenny,” he said, “where you find this buck?”

“Outside the school, over by Kennelworth.”

Larry turned my dollar over and over, and I started getting nervous.

“You know what, Kenny?”

“What?” I held my breath.

“This is some real strange stuff but I lost fifty cents over on Kennelworth yesterday and I bet my fifty cents got hooked up with someone else’s fifty cents and made this here buck.”

Whew! I let my breath go, smiled and nodded. We went to the store to get change and Larry Dunn got back the fifty cents he lost and I got to keep the other fifty that got hooked up with Larry’s. I knew if it wasn’t for Byron being my big brother Larry would have said something like “Since my fifty cents found this other fifty cents and they hooked up to make this here buck I’m gonna keep the whole thing. You know the rules, finders keepers, losers weepers.”

Having the school’s god as my relative helped in some other ways too. I had two things wrong with me that would have gotten me beat up and teased a lot more than I did if it hadn’t been for By. The first thing was, because I loved to read, people thought I was real smart, teachers especially.

Teachers started treating me different than other kids when I was in the first grade. At first I thought it was cool for them to think I was smart but then I found out it made me enemies with some of the other kids.

Back when I was in the second grade, Miss Henry used to take me to different classrooms and have me read stuff out of the Bible or the newspaper in front of other kids. This was a lot of fun until I started looking up from what I was reading and noticed that while Miss Henry and the other teachers were smiling a mile a minute, all the kids had their faces twisted up or were looking at me like I was a six-legged dog.

Two years ago Miss Henry took me to Mr. Alums’s fifth-grade class. Mr. Alums was the toughest teacher in the school and just being in front of him was kind of scary. He looked down at me and said, “Good morning, Mr. Watson, I hope you are in good form today.” I just nodded at him because I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Don’t be nervous, Kenny,” Miss Henry said. “Mr. Alums would like you to read a few passages from Langston Hughes.” She handed me a book and said, “You wait here while we introduce you to the class.”

Man! Some of the time I wished I was as smart as these teachers thought I was because if I had been I would have dropped that book and run all the way home. If I’d been smart enough to figure out what was going to happen next I would have never gone into that room.

I stood in the hall looking at the stuff they wanted me to read while Mr. Alums told his class, “All right, I have a special treat for you today. I’ve often told you that as Negroes the world is many times a hostile place for us.” I saw Mr. Alums walking back and forth whacking a yardstick in his hand. “I’ve pointed out time and time again how vital it is that one be able to read well. I’ve stressed on numerous occasions the importance of being familiar and comfortable with literature. Today Miss Henry and I would like to give you a demonstration of your own possibilities in this regard. I want you to carefully note how advanced this second-grade student is, and I particularly want you to be aware of the effect his skills have upon you. I want you to be aware that some of our kids read at miraculous levels.”

I saw Mr. Alums point the yardstick at someone somewhere in the class and say, “Perhaps you’d like to finish the introduction, I think you know our guest quite well.”

Whoever he pointed at said, “What? I didn’t do nothin’.”

Miss Henry waved for me to come in and stand in front of the class. I guess I was too nervous about Mr. Alums to have recognized the voice before, but as soon as I walked into the room I froze. There in the two seats closest to the teacher’s desk in the very first row sat Buphead and Byron! The Langston Hughes book jumped from my hand and the whole class laughed, everyone but Byron. His eyes locked on mine and I felt things start melting inside of me.

Mr. Alums slammed the yardstick on his desk and the class got real, real quiet.

“Let’s see if you find this so humorous after you’ve heard how well this young man reads. And Byron Watson, if you are incapable of taking some of the fire out of your eyes I assure you I will find a way to assist you.

“If, instead of trying to intimidate your young brother, you would emulate him and use that mind of yours, perhaps you’d find things much easier. Perhaps you wouldn’t be making another appearance in the fifth grade next year, now would you, hmmm?” Byron got one more dirty look in at me, then looked down at his desk.

Mr. Alums might as well have tied me up to a pole and said, “Ready, aim, fire!”

I read through the Langston Hughes stuff real quick but that was a mistake. Miss Henry said, “Slow down some, Kenneth,” and then she took the book from me and handed it back upside down. She had a great big smile when she told Mr. Alums, “When he goes too fast, this slows him down a bit.” I read some more with the book upside down and got some real strange looks from the fifth-graders.

Finally they let me quit. Mr. Alums stood up and clapped his hands and a couple of the old kids did too. Byron never looked at me the whole time but Buphead was giving me enough dirty looks for both of them.

“Bravo! Outstanding, Mr. Watson! Your future is unlimited! Bravo!” All I could do was try to figure out how to get home alive.

I didn’t even get out of the school yard before Byron and Buphead caught up to me. A little crowd bunched up around us, and everyone was real excited because they knew I was about to get jacked up.

Buphead said, “Here that little egghead punk is.”

“Leave the little clown alone,” Byron said. “It’s a crying shame, takin’ him around like a circus freak.”

He punched me kind of soft in the arm and said, “At least you oughta make ’em pay you for doin’ that mess. If it was me they’d be comin’ out they pockets with some foldin’ money every time they took me around.”

I couldn’t believe it. I think Byron was proud of me!

When everybody saw Byron wasn’t going to do anything to me for being smart they all decided that they better not do anything either. I still got called Egghead or Poindexter or Professor some of the time but that wasn’t bad compared to what could have happened.

The other thing that people would have teased me a lot more about if it hadn’t been for Byron was my eye.

Momma said it wasn’t important, that I was a real handsome little boy, but ever since I’d been born one of my eyeballs had been kind of lazy. That means instead of looking where I tell it to look, it wanted to rest in the corner of my eye next to my nose. I’d done lots of things to make it better, but none of them worked. I’d done exercises where I had to look that way, then this way, this way, then that way, up and down, down and up, but when I went to look in the mirror the eye still went back to its corner. I’d worn a patch on my other eye to make the lazy one work but that didn’t do anything either. It was fun to play like I was a pirate for a while but that got boring.

Finally Byron gave me some good advice. He noticed that when I talked to people I squinched my lazy eye kind of shut or that I’d put my hand on my face to cover it. I only did this ’cause it got hard to talk to someone when they were staring at your eye instead of listening to what you had to say.

“Look, man,” he told me, “if you don’t want people to look at your messed-up eye you just gotta do this.” Byron made me stand still and look straight ahead, then he stood on my side and told me to look at him. I turned my head to look. “Naw, man, keep your head straight and look at me sideways.”

I did it. “See? You ain’t cockeyed no more, your eyes is straight as a arrow now!” I went to the bathroom, stood on the toilet and leaned over to look in the mirror sideways, and Byron was right! I couldn’t help smiling. Momma was right too, I was a kind of handsome little guy when I looked at myself sideways and both eyes were pointing in the same direction!

Even though my older brother was Clark Elementary School’s god that didn’t mean I never got teased or beat up at all. I still had to fight a lot and still got called Cockeye Kenny and I still had people stare at my eye and I still had to watch when they made their eyes go crossed when they were teasing me. It seemed like one of these things happened to me every day, but if it hadn’t been for Byron I knew they’d have happened a whole lot more. That’s why I was kind of nervous about what was going to happen if Byron ever got out of sixth grade and went to junior high school before I caught up to him. That’s why I was going to send off for that book Learn Karate in Three Weeks that was in the back of my comic books.

The worst part about being teased was riding the school bus on those mornings when Byron and Buphead decided they were going to skip school.

We’d be standing on the corner waiting for the bus, Byron, Buphead and all the other old thugs in one bunch, Larry Dunn, Banky and all the other young thugs in another bunch, the regular kids like Joetta in a third bunch and me off to the side by myself. When we saw the bus about three blocks away we all got in a line—old thugs, young thugs, regular kids, then me. It wasn’t until the bus stopped and the door opened that I knew whether By and Buphead were going. I hated it when By walked past and said, “Give my regards to Clark, Poindexter.” Some of the time those words were like a signal for the other kids to jump on me.

But the day I stopped hating the bus so much began with those same words. We were all lined up. “Give my regards to Clark, Poindexter,” By said, and disappeared around the bus’s back. I got on the bus and took the seat right behind the driver. The days By rode I would sit a few rows from him in the back, on other days the driver was the most protection.

The bus drove down into public housing and after everyone was picked up we headed toward Clark. But today the bus driver did something he’d never done before. He noticed two kids running up late . . . and he stopped to let them get on. Every other time someone was late he’d just laugh at them and tell the rest of us, “This is the only way you little punks is gonna learn to be punctual. I hope that fool has a pleasant walk to school.” Then no matter how hard the late kid banged on the side of the bus the driver would just take off, laughing out of the window.

That was part one of my miracle, that let me know something special was going to happen. As soon as the doors of the bus swung open and two strange new boys got on, part two of my miracle happened.

Every once in a while, Momma would make me go to Sunday school with Joey. Even though it was just a bunch of singing and coloring in coloring books and listening to Mrs. Davidson, I had learned one thing. I learned about getting saved. I learned how someone could come to you when you were feeling real, real bad and could take all of your problems away and make you feel better. I learned that the person who saved you, your personal saver, was sent by God to protect you and to help you out.

When the bigger one of the two boys who got on the bus late said to the driver in a real down-South accent, “Thank you for stopping, sir,” I knew right away. I knew that God had finally gotten sick of me being teased and picked on all the time.

As I looked at this new boy with the great big smile and the jacket with holes in the sleeves and the raggedy tennis shoes and the tore-up blue jeans I knew who he was. Maybe he didn’t live a million years ago and maybe he didn’t have a beard and long hair and maybe he wasn’t born under a star but I knew anyway, I knew God had finally sent me some help, I knew God had finally sent me my personal saver!

As soon as the boy thanked the driver in that real polite, real country way I jerked around in my seat to see what the other kids were going to do to him. Whenever someone new started coming to Clark most of the kids took some time to see what he was like. The boys would see if he was tough or weak, if he was cool or a square, and the girls would look to see if he was cute or ugly. Then they decided how to treat him.

I knew they weren’t going to waste any time with this new guy, it was going to be real easy and real quick with him. He was like nobody we’d seen before. He was raggedy, he was country, he was skinny and he was smiling at everybody a mile a minute. The boy with him had to be his little brother, he looked like a shrunk-up version of the big one.

Everyone had stopped what they were doing and were real quiet. Some were standing up to get a better look. The older one got an even bigger smile on his face and waved real hard at everybody, the little shrunk-up version of him smiled and did the same thing. Then they said, “Hiya, y’all!” and I knew that here was someone who was going to be easier for the kids to make fun of than me!

Most of the kids were just staring. Then Larry Dunn said, “Lord today, look at the nappy-headed, downhome, country corn flake the cat done drugged up from Mississippi, y’all!” About a million fingers pointed at the new kids and a million laughs almost knocked them over.

Larry Dunn threw an apple core from the back of the bus and the new kid got his hand up just in time to block it from hitting him in the face. Little bits of apple exploded all over the kid, his brother and me. The other kids went wild laughing and saying to each other, “Hiya, y’all!”

The bus driver jumped out of his seat and stood between the new kid and Larry Dunn.

“You see? You see how you kids is? This boy shows some manners and some respect and y’all want to attack him, that’s why nan one of y’all’s ever gonna be nothin’!” The bus driver was really mad. “Larry Dunn, you better sit your ass down and cut this mess out. I know you don’t want to start panning on folks, do you? Not with what I know ’bout your momma.”

Someone said, “Ooh!” and Larry sat down. The bus was real quiet. We’d never seen the driver get this mad before. He pushed the two new kids into the same seat as me and told them, “Don’t you pay no mind to them little fools, they ain’t happy lest they draggin’ someone down.” Then he had to add, “Y’all just sit next to Poindexter, he don’t bother no one.”

I sat there and looked at them sideways. I didn’t say anything to them and they didn’t say anything to me. But I was kind of surprised that God would send a saver to me in such raggedy clothes.