Unblinking Read online

  I never saw the “frog boy” again, either. After I left the freak tent, I wandered around, but I couldn’t keep my mind on the rides or the animals. I wanted to go back in and tell that man to stop lying, to stop pretending to be something he wasn’t. The following year, I stayed away from that part of the fair, and the year after that, all the freak shows had been banished—it wasn’t okay anymore to stare at people because they looked different.

  Since then I’ve had dreams of walking into a freak tent and seeing my father under the lights: a tall, handsome man who can shift, in an instant, from black into white. Sometimes my little sister is standing beside him, her nappy blond hair flowing over her shoulders, her light, gray-blue eyes as soft as the sky.

  ⊙

  On the night of the playoffs, which were held in mid-March, the fairgrounds were a completely different place than they were in late summer. It was dark and cold, the wind whipping up dust, and the buildings seemed more than temporarily abandoned—they looked so forgotten and deserted, it seemed as if no one would ever use them again. The only light came from the arena and its parking lot, which was separated from the rest of the fairgrounds by a tall chain-link fence topped by strands of barbed wire. Only a few cars were parked inside the fence, and no people were in sight.

  “You sure they holding it here?” I asked Mel.

  “Yeah,” Mel said. “Ain’t hardly any cars ’cause most people come by bus. See, what they do is, they rent a bunch of buses, and then after the game, Highland Park go out the doors on their side and pile on their buses, and the other team go out the doors on their side and pile on their buses, and that way, nobody gets in each other’s faces.”

  Melanie had stopped the station wagon about a hundred feet back from the closed gate. “You can come in your own car if you want,” she said, tapping the steering wheel with her red-polished fingernails, each of which was divided by a thunderbolt decal. “Mostly nobody drive in their own car from Dearborn, I suppose cause they too afraid to be drivin’ over here, and mostly nobody drive in their own car from Highland Park because, for one, mostly nobody have a car, and for two, whoever ride on the buses get in free.”

  “I thought you said it was free regardless,” Jay said.

  Mel turned around and stared into the back seat. “Don’t tell me you don’t got two dollars in that fancy coat.”

  Before Jay could answer, I said, “I got extra.”

  We stepped out of the station wagon, walked across the asphalt, and slipped through the space between the two halves of the tall gate. It felt like we were sneaking into a prison, only there weren’t any guards.

  Inside the stadium was a big crowd, or really, two big crowds: at least a hundred, all white, including a sprinkling of Arabs, on the Dearborn side, and about two hundred, all black, on the side for Highland Park. The game was in the beginning of the third quarter, and Highland Park was leading, 28 to 23. If anyone had been collecting money at the door, they had stopped. Nobody was selling refreshments, either. I saw an empty block of seats about halfway up on the Highland Park side and motioned for Jay and Mel to follow me. I didn’t take Mel’s hand and was careful to not brush against her. I always held back from touching her in public whatever kind of crowd we were in, black or white or some of each. I had noticed that sex between blacks and whites, real or imagined, made racism burn hotter. And it didn’t fire up only white people’s tempers—it fired up black folks, too.

  As we started up the steps between the rows of seats, Mel waved to someone high in the stands, her hand arcing back and forth like a windshield wiper on high, her smile spread all the way across her pretty face. I reminded myself that she went to school with this crowd every day.

  We sat down, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving. I glanced up. Mel, looking up to the highest bleachers, was signaling to her friends, her thunderbolt pointer finger nailing the air near my head: This is him—my boyfriend. I was pleased, but still I said, “Mel, stop attracting attention.”

  “Oh, you gettin’ bad as Jay,” Mel said.

  I looked around for Jay. He was sitting in the row in front of us, off to my right, acting like he hadn’t come with us. He looked strange to me in that bright green suit and his shiny black boots; used to be all he wore were dull-colored T-shirts, jeans, and high-tops. “Hey, Slim, do I know you from somewhere?” I asked. He didn’t respond, so I leaned over and prodded his shoulder. Jay turned around slowly and just looked at me without speaking, his eyes full of misery and pleading. Then he faced forward again. I unzipped my jacket and settled back to watch the game.

  All of Highland Park’s players were black, and all of Dearborn’s were white—if you considered Arabs white, which everyone did back then, at least in Detroit, even though most Arabs were as dark as Mexicans. On Dearborn’s team, the Arabs were the stars. They weren’t as tall as their lighter white teammates or the Highland Park players, but they were quick on their feet and aggressive. There was a lot of bumping and shoving going on, but very few fouls were being called—one referee was white and one was black, and neither wanted to get mixed up in anyone’s business any more than they had to.

  The game stayed close, with Highland Park always between one and four points ahead. Then, as Kendall Jewel, Highland Park’s leading scorer, was driving in for a layup, a big white boy slammed into him, and Kendall Jewel went down hard. Everybody on the Highland Park side leapt to their feet. I was up before I knew it, trying to see what was going on, wordless cries mixed with swear words flying from my mouth. The crowd all around us was roaring with anger and disbelief. Someone near us said, “You see what that motherfuckin’ honky did?”

  A foul was called, and Highland Park announced a time-out. Down on the court, several Highland Park players were blocking a tall, long-armed teammate who was trying to reach the big, brawny white boy who’d laid out Kendall Jewel. “The Jewel” was lying motionless, flat on the floor, with the coach kneeling beside him. Then Kendall picked himself up and walked stiffly to the bench. The game started up again without him and, not long after, Dearborn made two shots and pulled into the lead. At the top of our stands, a group started to chant: “We the best, you know it’s true! Gonna kick your ass when the game is through!”

  The chant spread up and down our side of the stadium. I looked around to see if the teachers or principals would do anything about it. At Mumford’s games, there were always a few adults—teachers and parents and also the principal and vice p—scattered among the students. But I didn’t see any adults in the stands here, except for one man dressed in a superfly suit like Jay’s—only his suit was orange, and he was up on his feet and chanting like a wild man. There were no cheerleaders, either, at least none who were official. About fifteen girls without uniforms—some in skirts, some in pants—were standing on the wooden bleacher seats at the top of the stadium, dancing and clapping a beat to the chant: “We the best! You know it’s true! Gonna kick your ass when the game is through!”

  I didn’t join in the chant, and neither did Jay or Mel. Jay was facing straight ahead, as subdued as Kendall Jewel; Mel was admiring some skinny dark girl’s new baby. Mel held the baby with both palms and gave it a heft. “Girl, you laid yourself a brick!” she said. “Tree, check out this big baby.” I looked at the fat, light-skinned baby and smiled. He would grow darker—“ripe up,” my grandma called it—as he grew older. Though my grandma had said that about my sister, and Laura never did. There’s not a trace of black visible in my sister except in her hair, which is kinky but dark blond, and in her lips and her nose, which are a bit broad for a white girl. Whoever made up the rules on race—This is black, that is white—was messed up.

  The chanting continued until Highland Park pulled into the lead again. Then, when they fell behind, another chant started: “When you’re hot, you’re hot! When you’re not, you’re not! Gonna kick your ass in the parking lot!” Kendall Jewel was back in the game. The chanting seemed to keep getting louder. The bleacher seats clattered and
trembled with stomps.

  In the middle of all this commotion, someone behind us clapped his hands over Mel’s eyes—white hands, I saw. I looked up into this greasy white dude’s face as Mel peeled the hands from her eyes and turned around. “Dean!” she cried out. “What you doing here?”

  “Come to watch Highland Park kick some ass,” the white dude said. Mel smiled at him, then looked at me. “Dean, this is my boyfriend, Tremaine.”

  Just then another white dude walked up. While Dean’s hair was short and slicked back, this man, older than Dean, had long blond hair parted down the middle and divided into two braids. It was a style like you’d see on a white girl or an Indian, and besides those two head braids, the man’s beard was braided—he had three short blond braids that stuck straight down from his chin.

  “Bobby!” Mel shouted, grinning wide. She stood up and gave this weird person a hug. “I thought you was in Alaska.”

  “I was in Alaska,” Bobby said, smiling back. “But now I’m here.” Mel, still grinning, started the introductions over, this time trying to include Jay. But when she called to him, he turned around and grimaced in our direction without making eye contact, then turned back to the court, hunched up in his green suit coat like a turtle. I knew the last thing Jay wanted was to meet a couple of white dudes, especially one with three braids sticking down from his chin.

  Bobby and Dean, who turned out to be brothers, sat down right behind us. Whenever the game got exciting, the white brothers leapt up and shook their fists in the air and shouted. They even joined in on the chanting: “When you’re hot, you’re hot! When you’re not, you’re not! Gonna kick your ass in the parking lot!”

  “They don’t go to your school, do they?” I asked Mel, remembering she’d said all the white boys were scared rabbits. And also, these guys looked too old for high school.

  “Not anymore,” Mel said. “Dean got out about two or three years ago, and Bobby’s been out for even longer. He used to have short hair like his brother, but then he went over to Vietnam, and when he got back, he was totally different.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” I said. I could understand having two head braids if he was part Indian or something, but three blond beard braids? That didn’t seem to make sense on any kind of a person.

  “They live a couple blocks over from me,” Mel said. “Now Dean’s a fireman for Highland Park, and Bobby, he’s a handyman, plus he drives old women home from the store for a couple bucks.” She leaned close to me and said right next to my ear, “He looks kind of crazy, but really, he’s not. Vietnam made a lot of guys mean, but it did the opposite to Bobby—it made him more peaceful. Dean says Bobby won’t get drunk and raise hell with him no more, he just smokes weed and kicks back.”

  “Looks to me like he could still raise some hell,” I said. Bobby was on his feet again, chanting, thrusting his fist straight up like he was punching a ceiling. The few other people still chanting were seated, except for the girls dancing at the top of the bleachers. There were at least twenty dancing up there, laughing, having a good time. The wooden seats rumbled and thumped like drums with their measured stomping. I turned back to the game and watched the players sweep up and down the court.

  ⊙

  It stayed close all the way to the end, but Highland Park finally won, 52 to 50. The kids on the Dearborn side filed out of their exits quietly, heads down, drifting along their aisles like ghosts in a hurry. Some Highland Parkers were laughing and calling out happily, but others were still angry about that white boy slamming into Kendall Jewel. “Someone should slam his ass in the parking lot,” a short boy said.

  “We should knock them all on their asses,” another Parker answered.

  “Lucky they on the other side of this building,” a third Parker said. He cupped his hands to his mouth: “Run on off to the suburbs, you white chickens! You not cool enough to live in the city!”

  Mel had turned around in her seat to talk with Bobby while we waited for the crowd to thin. Even while I listened to the mix of angry and happy chatter of the folks passing out of the stands, I couldn’t keep my eyes from Bobby’s face—I was drawn to those three freaky braids jutting down from his chin. But I made myself look at the rest of his face, too. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were clear and cool.

  When the building was half empty, we got up and left. Bobby and Dean walked out right ahead of the three of us. There were no buses on our side—they hadn’t showed up yet, I guessed. The people standing around us waiting for the buses were all from Highland Park. The Dearborn crowd was on the other side of the arena, so except for Dean, Bobby, and Mel, there were no white people in sight.

  The white brothers and Jay and Mel and I started walking toward the gate. We’d only taken a few steps when I heard someone behind us say, “How’d they get over here?” And then someone else: “What they doin’ on our side?” They were speaking loudly on purpose, to make sure we heard them.

  Although the night was cold, the air behind us seemed to thicken with a kind of heat. I kept walking, Mel by my side. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Bobby and Dean were straight in front of us, Jay a little farther up ahead—trying to put some distance, I figured, between him and the white brothers and Mel. Some quieter Highland Park students were walking to the side of us and in front, and they didn’t seem to notice anything going on.

  I tried to walk at a normal pace, not too fast or too slow, I tried to pretend that nothing was happening behind us. Because I knew if I acted like I wasn’t afraid, if I acted like things were all right, that’s how things most likely would go. At least I hoped so.

  The parking lot lights shone down on us. Dean, Bobby, and Mel showed up more in that light than I did, and so did Jay, with his close-to-white skin. My own brown skin blended in with the night. It also blended in with the crowd. If I took two steps to the side, no one would know who I’d come with; I could just disappear. I could slip off and melt into that same-colored crowd, like my father had done.

  My hearing seemed sharper walking in front of that revved-up throng, as if I could pick up the slightest sound. I heard coat sleeves rustling and feet shuffling, sharp laughter and soft voices whose words I couldn’t make out—and beneath all these noises, I felt a fast, silent humming, silent and electric, racing through the air and the people behind me and throughout my whole body.

  Just then I heard a loud bang—it sounded like a gun going off. Bobby looked over his shoulder as if someone behind him had called his name. His head was tipped slightly back as he surveyed the crowd, his eyes narrowed and piercing, glasses catching the light, and his blond beard braids jutted like spikes from his chin.

  “Not them,” a voice said from behind us. And then another voice spoke, right next to my ear: “Not them—they’re from Highland Park.”

  But Jay apparently didn’t hear what they said. I guess all he heard was that loud bang like a shot, because he took off, sprinting in his black boots, his green suit coat sleeves pumping, the back of his jacket shining under the parking lot lights.

  Two bloods in jeans and high-tops started to chase him, imitating his arm-pumping, high-stepping stride. But they were just joking; they quickly circled back. Several others were kicking at a garbage can lying on its side—that’s what’d made the loud bang, someone knocking the can over. A few people were laughing at the can rattling and rolling around, spewing trash like a knocked-over white boy spilling his guts, and some were laughing at Jay for taking off like a track star after the starting gun. A girl with a loud voice said, “What’s that Negro running from?”

  But Jay didn’t hear that, either, I’m sure; he was too far gone by then. The chain-link and barbed-wire gate had been thrown open, and he passed through it and kept going, racing on past Mel’s car, running off into the dark fairgrounds between the stadium and Woodward Avenue.

  We drove around for ten minutes before we found him. We spotted him on Woodward, walking along the half-dark street like he knew where he was going, like he
had somewhere else to go besides home with us.

  ⊙

  Jay took off for real two years later—he totally disappeared—but by then I’d already lost track of him. Not long after the playoffs, his parents pulled him out of Mumford and enrolled him in an all-white prep school in Grosse Pointe, one of Detroit’s wealthiest suburbs. I heard he dropped out before the year was through. I’m not sure what he did with himself after that, before he went missing.

  For almost three years, no one knew where Jay was. His father finally found him living on the streets in Chicago and brought him home. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is genetic in part, but my sister, who is a therapist now, says living in a big city doubles the risk, and racism and other kinds of conflict also help to bring it on.

  The last time I saw Jay, over thirty years ago, he was living in a group home on the west side of Detroit. I didn’t have the heart, or maybe it was the guts, to visit him more than once. Looking at his confused eyes and unkempt hair, listening to him ramble on without understanding even half of what he said, I chose to step off—in other words, to disappear. Not that I decided, when I left the visitor room that day, that I wasn’t going back. But I never have so far.

  I ended up marrying a black woman who is darker than me, and there’s no question, color-wise, about our daughters. But my sister has two boys, Eric and Josh, who could pass for white. I love them almost as much as I love my own kids. Josh’s nickname among his black classmates is “Whitey.” And just the other day, a couple of white kids asked Eric, “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” So the conflict continues. There’s more truth than I like to admit in what Jay used to say: in some ways, even today, we are still living in the white man’s house—all of us, every single one of us, whether black or white or both.