Read Online Call Me by My Name by John Ed Bradley - Free Book Online

halls. I wondered if anybody was going to bring knives or guns or brass knuckles. There’d been rumors. One of our neighbors was keeping his daughter home just to be safe, as were a lot of other white parents. I didn’t believe any of the stories, but Pops did. He had me doing curls with a pair of dumbbells to make sure my biceps broadcast a certain message.
    Pops had caught the fish that morning, and we had them along with hush puppies, cucumber and tomato slices, and iced tea. We also had the ice cream for dessert and ate it from cereal bowls while watching TV. The news from Vietnam came to us in grainy black and white. My uncle Bay-Bay was there, fighting with the Marines. Pops liked to pretend his baby brother was still working on a crawfish farm in Evangeline Parish, rather than rooting Viet Cong out of tunnels.
    He got up and changed the channel. “Ed Sullivan’s still an hour away,” Mama said.
    â€œIn that case how about something we can digest by?” he said.
    There was a hi-fi console standing along the wall, as big as a coffin. He put a Ferrante & Teicher record on the turntable with the volume turned low, and we ate our ice cream to the whisper of golden pianos.
    â€œPops, guess what?” Angie said. She didn’t wait for him. “Julie’s maid said they want to be called black from now on.”
    I’d hoped we were done with it. She’d caught Pops as he was about to put another spoonful in his mouth. “They do? Who does?”
    â€œColored people,” she said. “Negroes.”
    â€œThey want to be called blacks now?”
    â€œThat’s what Julie said.”
    â€œThen we’ll have to make sure to call them something else,” he said.
    I kept looking at her. She didn’t acknowledge me.
    â€œWhen I was a child,” Mama said, “I had an uncle who used to say with utmost sincerity that he had no problem with the opposite race. Isn’t that the most amazing thing? The opposite race . . . I mean, yes, he confused the expression, but don’t you think he was really revealing his true feelings about colored—” She stopped herself. “I’m sorry, I mean black people. In any case, it stuck in my head and here I am mentioning it all these years later.”
    â€œLike there were only two races,” Angie said, “the white one and the black one.”
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œMost I know around here aren’t even black to start with, like Simmons at the plant,” Pops said. “They’ve got something else mixed in—what you call cream in the coffee. In New Orleans they call that café au lait. When I was a kid we called that high yellow, but I understand it’s not polite to say that now.” He ate some more and added as an afterthought: “You hardly see any black blacks anymore, the way you would have in the olden days, when they first got off the boats.”
    â€œThe boats?” Mama asked. “You make them sound so primitive. But they weren’t the only ones who got here in boats. How do you think we got here? In jumbo airplanes? In air-conditioned buses?”
    Angie: “You ever look closely at Tater Henry? He’s a lot like Mr. Simmons—a palette of many colors, all blended together. You even have yellow ochre and umber in the mix. Best of all, there’s vermilion, which I think makes all the difference. True black doesn’t reflect light, anyway, and that young man is positively radiant, so what does that make him?”
    â€œYellow okra,” I told her. “What the heck is yellow okra?”
    Pops got up and turned off the music. “Mark my words,” he said. “This experiment won’t work—this black-and-white thing? I could blame the federal judge that’s forced it on us, but I still say it’s Abra-damn Lincoln who got this ball rolling.”
    We knew when to stand up to him and when to let his declarations pass.