Free Call Me by My Name by John Ed Bradley Page B

They closed it. And they turned the building into a crummy junior high.” The outrage in his voice surprised me, and he wasn’t finished. “Clark was a great school,” he said. “And it had great sports teams. There were some cabinets when you walked in that were full of trophies won by all the championship teams.”
    I’d spent some time looking at the trophies in the cabinets at our own school, but I hadn’t seen any won by Clark’s athletes. “Where is all that stuff—you know, the trophies from those years before integration?”
    â€œLeft behind,” he said. “Just left behind like none of it mattered. What’s that tell you, Rodney?”
    At home Pops had been using the word “militant” to describe angry blacks who made the news roaring for civil rights, and I might’ve tried the word out on Tater now had I not wanted to hear his answer.
    â€œAll those seasons at Clark?” he went on. “The pictures of former players? Their medals and ribbons? It’s like it never happened. I like seeing progress, Rodney. I like this school a lot, and I’m proud to be a Tiger. But if you ask me, Clark deserved better.”

    We were out on the field an hour later. Everybody wore the same white helmets with orange-and-black stripes, but our side wore orange jerseys and white pants, while the other squad had on black jerseys and black pants. The Black looked more intimidating than we did, and one of the coaches acknowledged as much when he stood laughing at us during stretches and yelled out, “Dang if you don’t look like a pumpkin patch, the way you’re lined up in rows just now.”
    Coach Cadet had also arranged for the school band to perform, but it was proficient with only “Hold That Tiger,” an old ragtime tune that was our fight song. The band played it over and over, and we were already sick of it by the time we were done with warm-ups and waiting for the game to start.
    I’d dominated every defensive lineman on the team except for Rubin Lazarus, who was every bit as strong as I was, even though I outweighed him by thirty pounds. Rubin added to an appearance of menace with eye black that ran down his face in streaks. The eye black seemed an odd addition, considering we were playing at night, but the overall effect was undeniable: Here was a very intense and likely deranged person you didn’t want to trifle with.
    Rubin was so good that I quickly forgot there were other players sharing the field. We became the center of the universe, with a spotlight shining down on us from a hole in the heavens. As the game went on, I despised every large and small piece of him, and I despised his mother and father for siring such an animal, and the mothers and fathers who sired them. There were yet more generations to despise, especially after he knocked me to my knees and stepped on my tender vegetation en route to sacking the quarterback.
    We went at it hard, and it occurred to me, even as we were pounding on each other, that the intimacy involved in blocking a guy is a personal act that brings you closer to another human being than any other activity but one. Your skin rubs against his skin. You smell his breath and feel his weight when the play is done and he’s lying on top of you in the pile. You stare into his eyes from inches away and search for signs of surrender.
    By the end of the first quarter I’d already sweated enough to fill bathtubs, and my uniform had absorbed much of what he’d lost. And what I’d lost had gone into his. Everybody else was playing a game. I was playing for my life.
    â€œYou got me that time, Rodney,” Rubin told me late in the fourth quarter, after I’d driven him ten yards off the line and dumped him on his back.
    â€œI got lucky,” I said.
    â€œYeah? Heck, man, you get lucky a lot.”

    We had scored in the last minute to beat them, 27–23, on a Hail