Sleepaway School
Chapter 2
The thing is, I did fine in school at first. Until the third grade at least. It wasn’t a happy thing going there every day. But I filled my report cards with esses. For Satisfactory. Then one afternoon I was leaving the building after classes and standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, was a kid named Richard. Lucky Richard to me. I had seen him in passing mostly. Strutting down the corridors. Hobnobbing with friends in the cafeteria. Darting around the playground. Yet even in these stolen glimpses it could be seen. In the cut and fabric of his clothes. In his all-American good looks—the kind of looks that buy you an easier time of it all around—in the careless confidence of the very breaths he drew. That Richard was numbered among the luckier sons of this world. Those who seem to fit in so perfectly. And who move around so freely and effortlessly within what seems to be the natural order of things, you can’t help but half suspect God himself is on their side.
To this day I do not remember throwing the punch. Just a millisecond, maybe, of blankness. Nothing more than the space of an eye-blink, really. More like a sneeze than anything else. I only remember drawing my fist back from Richard’s face. Seeing the twin rivulets of blood trailing down his upper lip. Him gaping at me wide-eyed. Wondering why it had gotten into me to bash in his aquiline nose and despoil his perfectly pressed shirt.
I was as shocked as he was. I had never in my life thrown a punch at anyone. Slamming your fist into someone has always struck me as such a personal violation. Outrageous, and conspicuous, too. I have never been able to convince myself, in the instant between the impulse and the actual act, that anyone ever deserves it. Much less that I could ever deserve to be the one to dish it out. Yet for some reason some something in me had just cracked this kid dead in the face.
We stood there. Almost toe to toe. Each stunned. As if we both had just been mugged by some third person. Stood there panting into each other’s faces. I remember this precisely. Lucky Richard’s breath on my cheek. Remember it feeling like a prize finally won.
The principal, Mr. Gingrich, flew out of the building. And right behind him the gym teacher. They both grimaced when they saw me, still coiled in a boxer’s pose. Then gave me their backs and hovered over Richard, dusted him off, tilted his head back, put a handkerchief to his rudely abused nose. Asked him calmly and gently whatever, by God, had happened. To my surprise Richard didn’t scream or sneer, or cry, or accuse. Just shrugged and answered, with precise honesty, “I don’t know.”
The gym teacher glared righteous fire at me as he led Richard inside. A look that left me feeling like some sort of germ. Then Mr. Gingrich turned to me, his brows high on his balding head and asked, with exasperation on his breath, why I had done what I had done.
As if I knew.
Maybe it was just that it was a Thursday.
Thursday afternoons we had social studies. And for the last three weeks or so we’d been working our way through the 1700s and 1800s. A time of two very separate stories, to hear our history primers tell it. On the one hand, the Europeans. A whole parade of them. Stalwart men and women all. Each captains of their own fortunes. On the other hand, the Africans. The slave ships. The plantations. The North. The South. The Civil War. The Negro. A heritage all too stingy on the kind of valor, honor, courage and greatness that seemed to amply color all the rest of recorded history. All it did was make me squirm. It reeked of a lowliness with which I had no interest in being associated.
That particular Thursday had been the squirmiest yet. Not only because we were reading aloud in turn. A thing that drove me buggy. Having to suffer through the slower kids who can barely make out half the words, much less give them the flavor or nuance they obviously require. My eyes wandered out the window. And when I pulled them back in I noticed that the attention of several of my classmates had found its way to the back of the room, to where I had always sat beyond particular notice, their eyes making a shy but sly survey of me.
I thought there was a booger on my nose or something at first. Then, looking down at my textbook, at the bottom of the page, I saw the Currier & Ives illustration, a depiction of a creature barely recognizable as human. His limbs, lips, cheekbones and crown out of all proportion. Shrouded in filthy rags. And stretched across a pile of hay. Fast asleep. While in the background a handful of other people toiled away. A pair of smirking, fair-haired boys loomed over him, making a sport of trying to push a piece of straw into his grotesquely gaping nostrils. Below this the caption read simply, “Negro Slave.”
My face caught fire when I realized the connection my classmates were drawing between the guy in the picture and me. Worse than that, though, was what the picture seemed to confirm. That it is after all a them and us, chocolate and vanilla, world. A Norman Rockwell world for them and this Currier & Ives world for us.
So, maybe that was it. Maybe that was what I was carrying with me when I headed for the door that afternoon. Whatever it was, it clicked something in me I never knew was there. I mean I didn’t even know Richard, really. Never had anything in the least against the guy. I would have flushed with gratitude had he ever made the merest overture of friendship towards me, to tell the truth. Yet in that moment, glimpsing him there, leaning in the doorway, hands in his pockets, eyes at half-mast, his brow as clear and untroubled as a spring afternoon, some terrible, primal thing in me could not for a second longer abide his utter casualness.
Mr. Gingrich, as plump and balding and amiable as any Norman Rockwell principal, drew his forefinger like a stubby, pink gun and wagged it before me. “No, no,” I heard him saying. “This will not do. It will not do at all!” I hung my head. Peered over the toes of my shoes at the blood on the ground, a dark stain on the bright, sunlit concrete. And I had to agree. It certainly wouldn’t do.