New Boy (3 page)

"Same as you, I guess. Trying to get the best education I can, so I can better myself," I said. It was a stock answer, the identical
one I had given when a Draper alumnus had come to our house to interview me the year before.

"This guy sure has you figured out, Carrot," said Rolf Schroeder, a slim blond boy with a deep tan. "He knows exactly why
you're
here." Everyone laughed again except Vinnie and me.

"I don't understand," said Vinnie with a confused look. "Isn't that why we're all here? I mean why else would you come to a place like this?" The laughter abruptly stopped. The smiles disappeared and the mood outside the dormitory entrance, still washed in afternoon sunlight, became chilly.

"Who's he?" said Carrot, looking at me and nodding toward Vinnie.

"That's Vinnie," I said. "He's new, too."

"Vinnie, huh? Vinnie what?" said Carrot, this time looking straight at Vinnie.

"Vinnie Mazzerelli," said Vinnie, in a good-natured voice.

"Where ya from, Vinnie?" said Carrot. "You from Virginia, too?" I could feel something building, but I wasn't sure what it was.

"Me?" said Vinnie. "I'm from New York," and he pronounced it in a way I had never heard before: "Nooo Yawk."

"I thought so," said Carrot, with a hint of a sneer. "Tell me, Vinnie, what does your father do down in New York?" he added, making a crude attempt to imitate Vinnie's pronunciation. "Does he make spaghetti or drive a cab?" Carrot and his friends exploded in laughter. Even Vinnie laughed, although his face was flushed. I was speechless. I had always thought of prejudice
as exclusively a matter between black and white. Of course, I also knew what it meant to be treated unfairly by my own people, some of whom regarded me as spoiled or stuck up because of the circumstances of my birth or the fact that I did well in school, but these exceptions paled before the lengths to which white people were willing to go to maintain the myth of their superiority. It seemed Vinnie was being gored by the same ox. And he was a white boy.

"He's actually a cardiologist," said Vinnie when the laughter had died down.

"Where's his office?" said Peter Holcomb, a short boy with a crewcut who had been silent up until then. "The Lower East Side?" Carrot and his friends were doubled over in laughter. Vinnie was now red as a beet, his acne suddenly less apparent, but his face still managed to hold on to a tight, goofy little smile, despite the insults.

"He's got two offices," said Vinnie, with forced good humor. "One on Park Avenue and one at Mount Sinai."

"Oh, really?" said Carrot. "Is he a Jew, too?" And the group dissolved in laughter again at Carrot's rhyming.

"Hey, look, fellows," said Vinnie in a limp voice. "I don't know how this got started, but it's getting close to dinnertime and I want to wash up. So, if you'll excuse me," and he pulled open the dorm door to enter.

"Don't scrub too hard," said Rolf. "You might bleed to death." Snickering, the group strolled away.

I followed Vinnie into the dormitory. The first-floor hallway
had dark mahogany paneling and a tile floor. The lights were off, but in the shadowy coolness, I could see that his cheeks were wet, although he tried to wipe away the evidence with his shirtsleeve.

"How come they jumped on you like that?" I said in wonderment. "They really had it in for you." I thought that Vinnie might have offended one of them earlier in the day, or perhaps there was a feud between Vinnie's family and one of their families, like in
Romeo and Juliet.

"God, I don't know," he said. "I've never seen any of them before. I don't know what set them off, but they were pretty rough. I can take it, though. I've heard that kind of stuff before. I'll be all right."

I told Vinnie I would see him later, and went up to my room to stretch out on my bed. It was still light out, and, as I lay on my back, I could see the tops of the trees turning dark green against the pale blue sky. I thought about where my parents would be by now. Somewhere along the Jersey Turnpike, I guessed, and then it would be nightfall, through Delaware, Maryland, and home, all the places I had left behind, that I had wanted to leave behind. It was too late to call them back to come and get me. They were returning home. I was going forward. But forward to what? Who was this new person I wanted to become, freed of the carefully articulated mold of the good colored boy that the South—and even my parents—had prescribed for me? I recalled what my mother had said just before she left. "They won't let you forget that you're a Negro." Perhaps she's right, I thought. Perhaps I can't escape the image that others have created for me, but if I don't try, I will never know if I can or not. And this could be my only chance. I thought about the friends I had left behind in the South and the cramped, sad lives they seemed destined to lead, the hollow trappings of maturity they would be expected to acquire, a sharp suit of clothes, a Sunday hat, to have a regular job teaching school or sorting mail at the post office or even, perhaps, to become a professional sitting behind their own desk in their own office in the colored part of town. The card parties they would attend on Saturday afternoon. The house parties on Saturday night. Church on Sunday morning. Dinner on Sunday afternoon. Their lives would be defined by the limits of their existence in the South, and those limits were absolutely fixed and utterly impregnable. I wanted to find my own way of life one that did not depend on how well I fit the mold. I wanted to be myself, and if I did well, I thought Draper would give me that opportunity. But the incident with Vinnie troubled me. Suppose something like this happened again? And what if something like this happened to me? What would I do? How many others in the school were like Carrot and his friends? And what did they think of Negroes?

Weeks passed without another incident, although when I saw Vinnie, he would complain that the fellows on the second floor were giving him a hard time. Most of the time, I chalked it up to his tendency to exaggerate, like the time he told me Joe Louis was one of his father's patients.

"My dad said he's going to drive up one weekend soon with Joe Louis and take us all out to dinner," said Vinnie. Weekend after weekend passed, and they never showed up.

I went to classes, went to meals in the dining room, and attended to my studies, and I found that, as Cousin Gwen had recommended, I was most comfortable when I kept to myself. That way, the differences I noticed between me and those around me—teachers, classmates, fellow students—were less obvious. I still spoke like a southerner, and a colored southerner at that, and despite my efforts to disguise my accent to make myself sound more northern, it was common for my roots to be exposed when I spoke. Asked to recite in class, I could sense amused glances being exchanged between my classmates as I labored to deliver my assignment in a neutral voice. At mealtimes, I ate and listened to the table conversation and was often the first to be excused.

The conversation in the dining room was usually dreary, concerned with subjects in which I had no interest at all—golf courses, New York society, or which towns in Florida had the best beaches—but occasionally it touched on something that caught my ear. A member of the senior class had been caught with gin in his aftershave bottle and had been sent home. The
new French teacher's wife was spending an awful lot of time with Mr. Hall from the science department. They were often seen together around the campus, and one of the freshmen had overheard the French teacher, who was his dorm master, arguing about it with his wife late one night. "What do you expect me to do in this godforsaken place?" she was heard to have said. "Crawl into a hole?"

The subject of race, however, was never mentioned. Instead, the name of a well-known Negro athlete would come up, and everyone would agree that he was extraordinary. I had come from a community that regarded all sorts of Negroes as extraordinary—Dr. Carver, Dorie Miller, Marian Anderson, Father Divine—but none of them were ever mentioned. Nor was there any mention of Negroes like Emmett Till, whose name had been a household word at home after he was lynched. There was so much that they didn't know, so much, it seemed, that they didn't want to know. It was as though we didn't exist, except to provide them with entertainment, and it soon became clear that, among our people, white people admired the colored athletes above all others, if they even knew of any others. They preferred Willie Mays for his showmanship and his humility to Jackie Robinson, of whom, it seemed, they were wary. Nor was there much enthusiasm at all for Joe Louis, who was considered a god, if slightly tarnished, by everyone at home. For the most part, however, the conversation had little to do with me, and I had little to do with it.

And so I came to enjoy the privacy of my room. I understood that I was at Draper to work, and I had to do that on my own.
There were occasional visits from classmates, usually to get an assignment or to discuss an answer to a problem, but once the information was obtained, the visit was over and the visitor would depart. We received our first grades at the end of October and I nearly made the honor roll; however, Vinnie had not done so well. Nor had there been an improvement in his social life. He had become the butt of jokes on the second floor, some of which had to do with his skin condition and others with his heritage. On the second floor, Vinnie had become a pariah.

Vinnie was my only regular visitor. He would stop in for a social call, to fill me in on a recent development in his life or to ask my advice. I was usually working when he arrived, but he would tell me a joke or do an imitation of a teacher in the classroom, and it would be enough to get me to put down my book and laugh, which I did not otherwise have a chance to do. Nevertheless, he was struggling.

"You know what they've done now?" moaned Vinnie. It was a chilly afternoon in the middle of November, and the trees had been reduced to skeletons of trunks and bare branches, although the sun was strong and bright. He was seated on the edge of my bed while I was at my desk reviewing my history assignment. "They've put up signs."

"What kind of signs?" I said, looking up from my work and wincing. I knew all about signs,
WHITES ONLY, COLORED, NIGGERS

KEEP OUT. THIS ESTABLISHMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SERVE WHITE PEOPLE ONLY.

"In the bathroom," he said. "They put one over a basin that
says
VINNIE'S SINK
and another on the door to a stall that says
VINNIE'S TOILET
." Up until now, Vinnie had been able, with effort, to maintain his composure in the face of such indignities, but I could tell from his voice that he was starting to unravel. His face still held the lopsided smile that he often wore and his skin still bristled with acne, but his small, dark eyes were desolate, haunted. "What did I do to deserve this? Rolf told me they had a floor meeting and decided to give me my own sink and toilet and I'm not supposed to use the others. What can I do?" he said, in despair.

"Did you call your folks?" I said.

"I call my folks every night. My dad has already talked to Spencer several times," he said.

"What did Spencer say?" I asked.

"'Nothing to worry about. Boys will be boys. Everything's under control.' Meanwhile, I'm a nervous wreck. My grades are terrible. They're tossing shaving-cream bombs into my room at three
A.M.
, so I can't sleep. Nobody on the floor will speak to me, and the rest of the school thinks I'm impossible to get along with."

"I think your father ought to come up here and meet with Spencer face-to-face," I said. "That will get his attention."

"My father already suggested that to him," said Vinnie. "He even suggested a meeting with Spencer and him and all the kids on the floor to clear the air, but Spencer didn't want to do it. He said it wasn't necessary, and he didn't want to give the impression things are out of control. He said the school has traditions to
maintain and a reputation to uphold, and then he said something that burned my father up. He said, 'We all experience challenges in our lives, and character is measured by how we face up to those challenges and overcome them. Vince'—he never calls me Vinnie—'should think of this as just another challenge along the road of life.' I guess my dad got really hot when he said that. He told Spencer if things weren't straightened out soon, he was going to talk to a lawyer."

I was intrigued by Vinnie's mention of a lawyer. We never put much faith in lawyers at home. If you needed to draft a will or pass papers on a piece of property, you would hire a lawyer, but if you were colored and had a serious problem that involved the law, you were better off handling it yourself. It was cheaper, for one thing, and for another, the white lawyers couldn't be trusted, and neither could many of the colored ones. The courts were the worst of all. The judges thought it was their solemn duty to preserve segregation, and that was all that mattered. I didn't know anything about lawyers or courts in the North at the time, but if Vinnie's father was going to talk to a lawyer, I thought he must know what he's doing.

The next evening I had returned to my room after dinner when there was a knock on my door. It was Dillard standing in the doorway with a broad smile.

"Got a few minutes?" he said.

"Sure," I said. "Come on in." Although I didn't have any classes with Dillard, I had seen him around the campus often
since that first day, and he had always been friendly. He walked in, closed the door behind him, and took a seat on the bed.

"How's it going?" he said.

"Not too bad," I said. "Latin is a lot of work, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. And science is pretty tough, but everything else is under control." I was seated at my desk, and as I looked at Dillard hunched over on the edge of the bed, with his forearms resting on the tops of his thighs and his hands clasped between his legs, I began to wonder about the reason for this visit. "How about you?" I said.

"Pretty good. Team's doing pretty well. Made the honor roll." Could it be, I thought, that he still wants me to come out for the football team? "Say, you're a friend of Mazzerelli's, aren't you?" he said. I said I was. "Well, what's his problem, anyway?" Dillard was still smiling, but his tone of voice was hostile.