Read Online Voices in Our Blood by Jon Meacham - Free Book Online

They played in the discarded uniforms of our high school, so that our school colors—red, black, and white—were the same, and they even played the same towns from up in the delta that our high school played. We sat on the sidelines next to their cheering section, and sometimes a couple of us would be asked to carry the first-down chains. The spectators would shout and jump up and down, and even run onto the field to slap one of the players on the back when he did something outstanding. When one of the home team got hurt, ten or twelve people would dash out from the sidelines to carry him to the bench; I suspected some injuries might not have been as painful as they looked.
    The Panthers had a left-handed quarterback named Kinsey, who could throw a pass farther than any other high school passer I had ever seen. He walked by my house every morning on the way to school, and I would get in step with him, emulating his walk as we strolled down to Number Two, and talk about last Friday’s game or the next one coming up. We would discuss plays or passing patterns, and we pondered how they could improve on their “flea-flicker” which had backfired so disastrously against Belzoni, leading to a tackle’s making an easy interception and all but walking thirty yards for a touchdown. “Man, he coulda
crawled
for that touchdown,” Kinsey bemoaned. Once I said, “You got to get another kicker,” and Kinsey replied, “Lord don’t
I
know it,” because in the previous game the Yazoo punter had kicked from his own twenty-yard-line, a high cantankerous spiral that curved up, down, and landed right in the middle of his own end zone. But this was a freak, because Kinsey and many of his teammates were not only superb athletes, they played with a casual flair and an exuberance that seemed missing in the white games. A long time after this, sitting in the bleachers in Candlestick Park in San Francisco, I saw a batter for the New York Mets hit a home run over the centerfield fence; the ball hit a rung on the bleachers, near a group of little boys, and then bounced back over the fence onto the outfield grass. Willie Mays trotted over and gingerly tossed the ball underhanded across the wire fence to the boys, who had been deprived of a free baseball, and that casual gesture was performed with such a fine aristocracy that it suddenly brought back to me all the flamboyant sights and sounds of those Friday afternoons watching Number Two.
    On Friday nights, when the Yazoo Indians of Number One played, you could see the Number Two boys, watching with their girl friends from the end-zone seats, talking plays and pointing out strategy. One night my father and I went to the hot-dog stand at halftime and saw Dr. Harrison, the Negro dentist who refereed the Number Two games, standing on the fringes of the crowd eating a hot-dog. My father drifted over his way and said, “How’re you, Doc?” though not shaking hands, and they stood there until the second half started, talking about the virtues and shortcomings of the Yazoo Indians and the Yazoo Black Panthers.
    Co-existing with all this, in no conflict, were the hoaxes we would play on the Negroes, who were a great untapped resource. We would hide in the hedges in my back yard and shoot Negro men who were walking down the sidewalk, aiming BB’s at their tails. We would throw dead snakes from the trees into their path, or dead rats and crawfish, or attach a long thread to a dollar bill on the sidewalk and, when the man stooped to pick it up, pull it slowly back into the bushes.
    I took to phoning the Negro undertakers, talking in my flawless Negro accent, and exchanges like this would take place:
    â€œHello, this the undertaker?”
    â€œYes’m.”
    â€œThis here’s Miss Mobley, from out at Bentonia. I got me a problem.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œWell, my cousin just died, and I wonder if I can bury him under