Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London, SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers in 2015

Copyright © T. Geronimo Johnson 2015

T. Geronimo Johnson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Adapted from artwork by Amanda Kain. Cover images © dra_schwartz/Getty Images (tree); Gordana Simic/Shutterstock (feathers); American Spirit/Shutterstock (lawn jockey)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008101299

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007548019

Version 2015-12-08

More Outstanding Early Praise for

WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE

“Welcome to Braggsville is that rare book so highly charged with both comedy and tragedy, and so nimble in its storytelling, that it seems to understand the world of its characters down to the smallest particle. This is one of the most invigorating and least predictable novels of the year.”

—Kevin Brockmeier, award-winning

author of The Brief History of the Dead

“In exuberant prose, Johnson takes aim at a host of issues, gleefully satirizing political opportunists, social media, and cultural mores … a provocative exploration of contemporary America that is likely to be a hit with adventurous readers.”

—Booklist

“DeLillo-esque for its orgiastic pop-culture roiling, Welcome to Braggsville deconstructs race, class, and gender, leaving the human heart wholly intact. This is a virtuoso performance by one of our strongest new voices.”

—Richard Katrovas, award-winning

poet and author of Scorpio Rising

“Geronimo Johnson’s powerful second novel combines the intellectual urgency of a satire with the emotional resonance of a tragedy. Welcome to Braggsville is as smart as it is subversive, and as bleakly hilarious as it is deeply necessary.”

—Jennifer duBois, award-winning

author of A Partial History of Lost Causes

“In Geronimo Johnson’s brilliant, wildly satirical, and also deeply sobering book, we move between Berkeley, California, and Braggsville, Georgia, looking to decode no less than the deepest secrets of how race is lived in America. The story looms larger than life. At every turn, the impasses Johnson shows us are our own.”

—Tess Taylor, award-winning

poet and author of The Forage House

“Inventive, provocative, troubling, hilarious: It’s hard to sum up Welcome to Braggsville in any other way but to add the word ‘wildly’ in front of each of these words.”

—Robin Hemley, author of Do-Over!

“A riotous tour de force.”

—Andrew Lam, award-winning author of Birds of Paradise Lost

“A stylish satire about the worst that can happen when four idealistic friends try to bring Berkeley activism back to Braggsville—a time warp of a small Southern town. A painful, funny novel.”

—Bennett Sims, author of A Questionable Shape

“The evidence you need that a reexamination of the past can be a prescient warning for all our future days is magnificently in your hands.”

—CAConrad, poet and author of ECODEVIANCE

Dedication

For all the Louis Changs, from my parents

Meet the New World, same as the Old World.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Sexicon (The Glossary for the Rest of Us)

Appendix 2: Works Cited

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by T. Geronimo Johnson

About the Publisher

To be likened? The moon’ll tell. Might not a listen, might not a like it, but it’ll tell if you can. Give yourself in a jar. Cleave a tomato. Pick the seeds clean. With your mouth, now. Leave it sit for three days behind that rank of elfinwood yon. A palm of milk and enough honey to feel right and rub it back up in there real good. Sleep on your left side. The moon’ll tell you, in sooth, but you might not like it, even if you be likened. You can bathe at the river, can’t you? But dam it? Tell me, now, what good be a pond with no fish? You seen Bragg. Recollect.

—Nanny Tag

Chapter One

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because your daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed Battlestar Galactica, Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Ding-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of WALL-E, Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called What’s Happening!!, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes, ma’am, Daron it is. What about this apostrophe, this light-headed comma? Feel free to correct me. Oh no, ma’am. Ignore that. It’s all one word, ma’am. No need to call me ma’am. Yes, ma’am.

AS WAS EXPECTED OF VALEDICTORIANS, he had spoken of choices, though not his personal choices. His desk was stuffed tighter than a turducken with acceptance letters, but to list those would have been smug and boastful when most classmates were going to State or to stay. He instead pontificated on abstract opportunities to be grabbed, snatched out of the air like so many feathers, of the choices life extended to those who dared dream, of new worlds awaiting, of hopes to be fulfilled and expectations met, of how they would go forth and put B-ville, GA, squarely on the map. Never mind that it was ninety-two degrees, never mind that they could drink the air, never mind that, as Nana used to say, it was so greatly humid a cat wouldn’t stretch its neck to lick its own juniors, he carried on about wishing over dandelions, and their delicate floating spores, and how they multiplied, superstitions taking seed even without belief—where he had heard that he couldn’t recall—and explained that our eyes move when we dream, and, lastly, with a smile, advised the audience to, Always use sunscreen. His parting blow: an open invitation to visit him at My future alma mater, until then unknown to his father. Teachers applauded vigorously; peers clapped listlessly, more with relief than appreciation, but they didn’t understand, and that was why he was glad to be leaving. He stepped from the podium a free man, at long last deaf to their tongues, and later thanked with aplomb the classmate who sidled up to the smoking steel drum and congratulated him on his engagement.

Chapter Two

Of course there were the Bulldogs or the Yellow Jackets or the Panthers, or even the Tigers. And after a week as a Golden Bear, he wondered if one of those might have been a better choice. Long accustomed to the teacher calling on him after his classmates proffered their feeble responses, D’aron sat in the front row but never raised his hand. He was not called on to moderate disputes, to weigh in on disagreements, to sagely settle debates. He was not called on at all, even when the subject in American History turned to the South, a topic on which he considered himself an expert, being the only Southerner in the class. (Not even when D’aron resorted to what the prof called a Horshack show.) The professor rationalized his reluctance to call on D’aron on such occasions as a resistance to essentializing. Said resistance D’aron found puzzling, and said affliction he apparently had developed no resistance to, constantly provoking the professor to ask, Am I the only Jew? Mika the only black? You the only Southerner? If the professor said he was Jewish, well, D’aron would take his word for it. Mika, though, was obviously the only black in class, and D’aron the only Southerner. Wasn’t he essentially Southern? Wasn’t that the core of his being, his essence, as it were? At least that was how he felt now that he was in California.

He held doors for the tender gender and all elders. Thank you and Please and May I adorned every conversation. Ma’am was an escape artist extraordinaire, often slipping out midsentence. Professors wagged their fingers, but even the one who claimed it aged her, Only slightly less subtly but just as permanently as gravity, appeared at moments to relish this memento of a bygone era, this sole American who, like foreign students and athletes, recognized the instructors as ultimate authorities, approaching their bunkers as shrines bearing cookies and other gifts in outstretched hands, like a farmer leaving a peck of apples or a pair of just-plucked broilers at his lawyer’s back door. Sir he could utter without censure.

Yet this inbred politeness was not what set him apart. Every student at Berkeley—all 36,142, he believed—played an instrument or a sport or volunteered for a social justice venture or possessed some obscure and rare talent. Or all four. Students raised in tents in Zimbabwe by field anthropologists and twin sisters who earned pilot’s licenses at age fifteen and Olympians from as far afield as Norway. One student athlete, a track star, upon being asked, Are you considered fast in your country? smiled charitably, I am the fastest.

And the Asian students, he’d once confessed awe-stricken during a phone conversation with his mother, Some of the Asians, well, I shouldn’t say some when they are a majority, but some of the Asian students speak multiple languages—more than a Holy Roller—languages I didn’t even know existed. Kaya, in Calc Two, for example, is half-Korean but raised in Malaysia. She speaks Korean like her mom, Chinese like her dad, Malay like her cousins at home, and is already in French Two and Spanish Three. Does she even speak English? He sighed. Don’t fret, honey. You earned the right to be there and you’ll do fine DD baby. Don’t fret. He murmured his thanks, reluctant to admit, let alone explain, that his distressed aspiration bespoke not lamentation but yearning. Kaya! Kaya mesmerized him, sitting in the basement commons study sessions twirling her hair around her pen as she wrote notes in Korean and IMed in English and tweeted in Malay, all while conjugating the subjonctif, her bare knees pressed together to balance a laptop surely hot to the touch.

DON’T FRET, HIS MOM WOULD REPEAT after his long silences. He didn’t.

He didn’t fret. Nor did he reckon. Or figure. Or git. Or study. Having followed his favorite cousin Quint’s advice and picked a school more than a day’s drive from home, he found the freedom intoxicating. If his parents could see him Monday mornings: tongue a rabbit’s tail, stiff and bristly, D’aron not knowing whether to feel pride or shame. They guessed at it, though, after reading his midterm report. His mother, Are you sick, honey? His father, in the background, With alcohol poisoning maybe. (Following that call, D’aron changed his mailing address to the dorm.) But he didn’t yet regret his decision to go westward-ho!

When he’d left home back in August to start school, Quint warned, Don’t go ABBA or Tiny Dancer! Huh? Don’t get gay. Don’t get roofied and get made gay, either. Or, ho-mo-sex-u-al.

When he returned home for Thanksgiving, Quint squinted, You got AIDS? D’aron gave a lick and checked his reflection in his spoon, as if he hadn’t only hours before, and every morning for that matter, paraded at length before the bathroom mirror in his skivvies. I can see your fucking ribs. You need a one-eight-hundred number. D’aron smiled. Without grits and waffles and hash browns and toast all at the same breakfast, and with walking everywhere, the famous freshman fifteen had gone the other way, but it looked and felt like fifty. Without the extra weight, he could finally confirm that his relatives weren’t lying when they insisted he’d inherited his father’s shoulders and forehead, and his mother’s eyes and nose, and from them both a decent height.

And when he went home for Christmas, his aunt Boo teased, So you do have cheekbones. What are they feeding you, grass? You spent that money I sent you on crack?

Hey, hey, c’mon Auntie B.! Don’t essentialize. All crackheads aren’t skinny.

Is that a joke, Dookie? I got one for you. Hay is for horses!

He loved his family, but God was he glad they now lived so far away. Quint was at least right about that.

During those three years in special ed, I only missed the food. Quint paused. And tits. And of course my mom, she’s mom, you know. And you, number one cuz. Exclamation point by way of a punch. But sure didn’t miss all the yappity yip-yappity yap. And hunting. I missed hunting.

At least Jo-Jo, D’aron’s best friend from high school, was happy for him. Jo-Jo patted his belly, I oughta go to college. That was a lot from him.

CHRISTMAS BREAK DIDN’T END SOON ENOUGH. The morning the dorms opened, D’aron was on the ground in Cali three time zones away. It wasn’t even the same country. By then he understood the geo-lingo. San Francisco was The City, Oakland was O-town, to be avoided at night—that was where the blacks lived—and the city of Berkeley was Berzerkeley, while Berkeley the school was Cal. The East Bay, where Berzerkeley was located, supposedly suburban, felt plenty busy. Collectively, it was the Bay Area, a megalopolis—oh how that word polished his tongue—where the elsewhere unimaginable was mere mundanity.

Across the bay, The City convened in costume to race from bay to breakers. Happy meal toys and plastic bags were long outlawed and voters threatened circumcision and goldfish with the same fate. They’d once had a mayoral candidate named Jello. A roving band of Rollerbladers performed the Thriller zombie dance—that pop nativity—Friday nights in Union Square. And fuck, it was China in the airport. Yet The City thought Berzerkeley was weird. D’aron thought it beautiful, never mind the nag champa, never mind the crusty hippies and gutter punks in greasy jackets stiff as shells lined up on Telegraph Ave hawking tie-dye and patchouli and palming for change. On clear days, a pageantry of wind and water under sun, the bay a sea of gently wriggling silver ribbons, and the Golden Gate hovering in the distance like a mystical portal. East of campus lazed tawny hills. On foggy days blinding bales of cotton candy strolled the avenues dandy while in the distance the tips of the bridge towers peeked through the mist like shy, gossamered nipples. The Bay Area was a beautiful woman who looked good in everything she wore.

What had intimidated him those early weeks of his freshman fall semester felt like home during his second semester—freshman spring. The clock tower known as the Campanile rose from the center of campus with the confidence of the Washington Monument, marking time in style, and on the hour, music students sounded melodies on the carillon. He often lunched alone at the base of that monolith, on the cool stone steps, facing the water due west, attention drifting with the lazing waves and the steady stream of Asian students moving—no, migrating—between the library and the engineering buildings. As he worked up the courage to wander farther from Sather Gate, the symbolic campus border, he discovered Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Thai: tastes luring him deeper and deeper into a town of Priuses and pedalers, both of which yielded patiently to pedestrians. Laid back, liberal, loose. The locals’ mantra, No worries; the transplants’ motto, It looks like a peninsula but feels like an island.

Chapter Three

His second semester, freshman spring, also brought a life-altering move to a new dorm. His first-semester six-man suite had been too rowdy, excepting D’aron, of course, so the RA dispersed them across campus like parolees. D’aron’s new roommate wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee, kung fu comedian. Asked who the first one was, he answered, See?

Chang, aka Louis Chang, aka Loose Chang, was none too pleased to have a D’aron Davenport aboard. After Louis’s former roommate dropped out midway through the first semester, he’d grown accustomed to living single in a double. The room was barely fifteen by fifteen, with a bed, desk, and chair on each side, and on the wall opposite the door a window overlooking the courtyard. The day D’aron arrived clothes smothered both beds and books tottered on both chairs: chemistry, botany, zoology on one side; George Carlin, Steve Martin, Paul Mooney on the other; and atop each pile several well-worn National Geographics. Had Res Life double-booked the room?

Chang crossed his arms, Which side do you want?

He was slight, dark-skinned, narrow of eye, and like so many other California Asians, he spoke with no accent, a phenomenon to which D’aron was still growing accustomed. At home, all the Chinese people (seven) had thick, nearly impenetrable accents, incomprehensible unless pronouncing dinner items; numbers and directions were plain fudruckers. Shrimp-fry-rice. Yes. Fie-dolrah-fitty. Huh?

Well? Chang repeated his question.

The right side?

Chang nodded, Good, we’ll get along.

They did. Not only because Louis was possibly the only Asian male who hadn’t mastered that damned twirling trick—pen mawashi—and not only because they had, surprisingly, so many common interests—porn, the Premier League, Arcade Fire, Tyler the Creator, Kanye, Kreayshawn—but because Louis was hilarious and possessed of an enviable irreverence. Strolling along Telegraph Ave, Chang responded to the gutter punks’ outstretched palms with, No, it’s Chang … Chang. And once to a black bum in People’s Park he shrugged, You got Obama, what more do you want? Then he gave him a dollar.

Louis also didn’t flinch when D’aron slept with his head to the window the night before tests so that he would wake up on the right side of the bed. Pointing at the little mirrors—which D’aron hadn’t before noticed—Louis admitted, Mom’s feng shui–zee crazy.

Loose Chang was a refreshing antidote to the somber, tense mood sweeping campus. Old folks gathered year-round at the West Gate hoisting nuclear disarmament signs with surprising gusto, and young folks huddled on Sproul Plaza extolling the virtues of the tree people—Ewoks, according to Chang—who had lived like monkeys for more than a year, occupying old oaks to prevent the university from cutting the trees down, all of which D’aron found odd, being from a town where they flew flags high, carried guns with pride (no matter how much they cost, they’re cheaper than dirt), and everyone worked for the same hot air factory (though they called it a mill). As of late, though, there were also rumors about tuition hikes and budget cuts and the threat that the school would accept more out-of-state fart sniffers to collect more out-of-state tuition. Those out-of-staters who protested that they’d earned their scholarships, as D’aron felt he surely had, were eyed with even greater disdain. By the middle of his freshman spring semester, helicopters were hovering over campus more days than not, buildings were regularly occupied by designer-sneaker Zapatistas—rappers for some—and students were on hunger strikes. Five days couldn’t get together without his mother calling to remind him that he was there to learn, not cause disorder, and that he was to study and be respectful and mindful of the professors. And always say please and thank you, and sir and ma’am. You’ll be amazed.

Louis routinely received the same directives in person. His family lived in the Richmond district of The City and thought nothing of showing up unannounced and en masse—parents, twin little brothers, and two great-uncles—to deliver healthy snacks, inspect living quarters, and shoot D’aron the hairy eyeball. We were in the neighborhood, they’d say, though according to Chang, before his acceptance to Cal his parents hadn’t driven farther east than the downtown San Francisco Embarcadero for fifteen years. Sometimes they’d offer no greeting, just sit on D’aron’s bed and wag their mysterious tongue. (Was this what Prof. Kensmith meant by cultural relativity? Louis’s grandmother insisting that D’aron sample her homemade candied fruit under her watchful cloudy eye, tapping the bottom of his chin with two fingers to assist mastication. He knew a hex when he tasted one, and packed the sour green resin away with the deft touch of one long accustomed to surreptitiously enjoying Bandits only feet from the chalkboard. Later, he would slip into the bathroom and send the waxy balls to the bay, but not before his tongue grew numb and resentful.) After his family left, Chang would apologize for the stares. They’re just old-fashioned, just old-fashioned, just old-fashioned, he chanted for weeks before admitting that his parents thought the messy half of the room was D’aron’s.

The real disappointment, though, was that Chang did not know Kaya, and so couldn’t broker an introduction. D’aron was certain that if an Asian introduced him to Kaya, or she saw him with an Asian, she would be more likely to consider him datable. This wasn’t mercenary but pragmatic. At home, whites identified the blacks who would date them by watching who their friends were, and vice versa. He went everywhere with Louis, but the campus was quite large.

The perfect opportunity arose only a couple weeks into the semester. Some students in his old dorm were hosting a dot party, and Kaya would certainly be there. Per the tweet, one rule: Wear a dot where you want to be touched. Chang affirmed his attendance before being asked.

Chapter Four

Under black lights installed in the basement commons for the occasion, Day-Glo stickers radiated warmth from cheeks left and right, aft and fore, knees and elbows for the shy, and hearts for many, though more than one person complained vigorously that they meant breast not heart. Golden Bears milled, glowing smiles, drinking sodas, though some clearly had other substances. Golden Bears clotted in pairs and groups of three, laughing too loudly, though some were obviously looking for a better conversation. Golden Bears kicked it in dark corners, though some wore poses of cool disaffection that were indistinguishable from anxiety. Four people wore dots in the middle of their foreheads, which, oddly, some found offensive. D’aron meant only that he wanted to provoke, in the words of his lit professor, A raging storm of violent thoughts, an explosive torrent that demands channeling lest it destroy you by driving you mad, making you whom the gods would have. Whatever that meant. That was often his answer when asked, but really he thought it subtle reverse psychology. No one seemed to believe that either, unfortunately, and about an hour into the party, he found himself in the sunken courtyard with Louis and the two other dot heads, as he thought of them: a blond female with weepy eyes and a black guy with pig-iron arms, obviously an athlete, like most of theyselves at Cal.

Louis looked at each of them and made a show of counting on his fingers, One little, two little, three little Indians.

The blonde groaned with understanding. Shit!

The black guy shrugged. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke. He pointed to Louis’s forehead. Make that four. Or are you really Indian?

This happened to Louis on occasion, him being Malaysian. He also caught hell at the airport from the devil in the blue uniform. Yes, he told them in his best Bollywood accent. I am Indian, naturally, not through adhesive like you. How feel would you if I wear Afro wig and gold teeth, and carry pit bull puppy naming Takesha?

The black guy laughed. You’re funny, dude.

Hella funny, thank you. And you, he turned to the blonde, you, madam, how would you like when you come to my country and I wear a blond wig like valley girl, speak, you know, you know, you know, it was like. He paused to suck his teeth. You are not liking very much that?

The blonde went crimson and pursed her lips, clutching her neck as though cut, slashed, hacked even, spewing tearful, spittled apologies through the air.

Louis reached for her shoulder, which surprised D’aron because it seemed an apologetic overture when Louis himself always insisted that the comic’s job was to wake people up—with a full five-finger slap when necessary. She jerked away, her ponytail splitting the night. It was too late. The tears were in full-court press. She hadn’t meant anything by the dot, only that she wanted a good conversation, and she was from Iowa, and even if she had meant something by it, no one in Iowa would have gotten so upset about it. What is it with Berkeley that you can’t make any kind of joke, even accidentally?

D’aron hadn’t really noticed her until she began crying. (Louis would argue, The reptilian brain is like a Japanese tourist armed with a digital camera with infinite memory; therefore D’aron had noticed her, but hadn’t yet noticed that he had noticed her.) Now he looked again. She was average height for a woman, her chin at his shoulder, and average build, at least for D’aron, because her physique was not that of the desiccated, squirrely girls who foraged at the co-op, standing in the center of the aisle as still as Lady Justice with a container in each hand while deliberating the benefits of garbanzo miso versus soy miso. No. Hers was a figure forged in the same furnace as the girls he’d grown up with, with full legs and arms, and long straight hair, past the neck, that at night glowed like butter on burned toast. She sniffled and her cheek twitched, tickled by a tear, and he felt compelled to protect her.

He’s just joking, he’s Malaysian, not Indian, explained D’aron. To Louis, You’ll cut your tongue talking that way.

Really? The blonde sniffed. Screw you! She flipped off Louis, though she didn’t thank D’aron. But she did look him over.

What’s the difference, asked the black guy. Welcome to the club.

The difference, Louis explained, is miles and miles, but that’s about all.

D’aron laughed and removed his dot. They all followed suit, except Louis, who pantomimed looking in a mirror, dusting his lapels and arranging his hair. How do I look?

They replaced their dots.

The Prayer, an old Bloc Party song, played in the background, the band’s prerecorded clapping in rhythm with the strobe light. Their faces flashed in unison as the lyrics drifted out to D’aron, one line catching his ear: Is it wrong to want more than is given to you, than is given to you? For the first time at Berkeley, he felt at ease. He half hummed, half sang the lyrics. Is it wrong to want more than is given to you, than is given to you? No, it’s not.

Excuse me? hissed the blonde.

My, you’re sensitive …

The blonde glared at him. You mean a mite sensitive? She drawled out mite.

How’s that?

How?

How, Tonto!

The blonde cranked her middle finger up for Louis. I resent that, especially coming from you. I’m part Native American.

Aren’t we all?

Thus they became the 4 Little Indians. D’aron, Louis, Charlie, and Candice. It mattered not that Louis swapped statistics for film studies only to be near Candice, and she swapped theater for rhetoric only to be near Charlie. D’aron was just glad to be close to her, and to have friends who were also uncertain about their place at Berkeley, and who were nerds, not that anyone could be a nerd at Berkeley. Besides, he had heard that it was easier to get a girlfriend when you had a girlfriend, so being seen with Candice could only further his cause with Kaya (who that night was nowhere to be seen). When D’aron muttered his frustration, Charlie confirmed his theory: The most important lesson I learned in high school was that banks loan quickest to those who don’t need money.

But first they reentered the party, and, as Indians are wont to do, were promptly relocated. One by one, D’aron, Candice, and Charlie were tapped on the shoulder. One by one they were beckoned outside by strangers mouthing entreaties in tones too polite to be heard over the music. One by one, one little, two little, three little Indians followed their interlocutors—new friends, they thought—to the exit, where they could be better heard. Once reassembled at the outer door to the basement commons, in the sunken courtyard where they’d first met, the 3 Little Indians faced a brave detachment of revelers—a cobbler’s dozen threatening to give them the boot—a hodgepodge of both upper- and lowerclassmen, both humanities and science majors, both athletes and scholars, both males and females, students tall and short, brunette and blond, stout and slim, sober and drunk-it.

Their leader? A feisty blonde who wielded her index fingers like a two-gun cowperson, a blonde who stood offended by, Your savage insensitivity, who exclaimed in a voice inflated by indignation, Only freshmen could disgrace a simple dot, a blonde who had the decency to wear her own ornament politely left of center, Where the heart is actually located, a blonde who suggested that they do the same and, Show some empathy for other people. Some respect, too.

There, in that umpteenth year of our Lord, at Dormitory Door, a historic treaty was proposed: Remove the dots and you can stay.

During the blonde’s speech a cluster grew, not chanting Fight! Fight! Fight!, but listening intently, as in a lecture, cupping ears and shushing and frowning as each new outflux burped though the dorm doors with the sonic aftertaste of thumping bass. The cluster was soon a crowd, and the crowd soon a congregation constellating in concentric circles around the 3 Little Indians: In the buildings students at their dorm room windows watched like wary settlers wondering how their wagon circle had been breached; within the ring of buildings, passersby perhaps expecting a juggling show or puppetry performance milled at the outer edges of the courtyard, popcorning on tiptoe; within them was a ring of polka-dotted partiers; within them were the blonde’s foot soldiers (that cobbler’s dozen Louis later referred to as Satan’s Anal Army). Our Tribe in the center, fidgeting, with the exception of Charlie, who stood lock-kneed a couple feet apart, and whom no one directly addressed or approached, as if he both was and wasn’t there, a secret at a family reunion, in the same way that no Braggsvillian ever mentioned how Slater Jones was born near the end of his father’s uninterrupted fifteen-month tour of duty. (Everyone just lamented how he was a preemie, and that’s why he was shorter than a Georgia snow day and so Old Testament angry at math.) Yes, Charlie stood there like a secret, if such a thing was possible, which obviously it was. Candice, for her part, was as beet colored as a real red man.

The offer was repeated: Remove the dots and you can stay.

Around this time Louis wandered out, with his collar prepped up and pop-star sunglasses on, and stood next to D’aron.

The blonde pointed to Louis. Except for you! Looking puzzled, she asked, Why are you even out here?

I’m with them. Louis tipped his sunglasses up and mirrored her puzzled expression. The better question is why are you wearing yoga pants?

The blonde blinked as if rebooting. Why are you even out here?

I’m with them, repeated Louis. He again mirrored her puzzled expression. The doors belched two stumbling students and a few bars of a tricky beat. The even better question is why are you blasting that Jay Z and Punjabi MC joint?

Blink. Reboot. Repeat: Remove the dots and you can stay.

Louis began speaking. Candice interrupted him. I’m Candice Marianne Chelsea. I am part Indian. She tapped her forehead. Not the kind you were looking for, but the kind you found. One-eighth to be exact. And I’ll be damned if you get to tell me what to do anymore. She shouldered past the blonde and the foot soldiers and walked in the direction of the door. The crowd parted like the Lord was drawing her finger through water. Charlie followed. The crowd parted wider, eyes to feet. D’aron and Louis followed, but were rebuffed, drowned in the confusion like the Pharaoh’s men after Moses.

When Candice looked back and saw D’aron and Charlie floundering, she huffed and shook her head like a disgusted parent. She pointed to the nearest courtyard exit, put her hands to her mouth like a megaphone: Let’s go. Where I’m from, women don’t need to wear stickers for guys to know where to touch us.

She huffed and marched in the direction of Bancroft Avenue. The other three followed, and 4 Little Indians laughed hee-hee-hee all the way home, never more so than when Candice again claimed to be part Native American. For real!

AFTER HIS ABYSMAL FIRST SEMESTER, D’aron’s academic advisor suggested a meeting, her e-mail as disconcerting as Quint blasting Dio in that stolen ice cream truck. (When Sheriff appeared at his door worn by rue, Quint told him, Grand theft audible: possibly six months. Selling Good Humor wherever the fuck I want, including the Gully: priceless. Sheriff handed him the cuffs. You know how these work.) The good humor of the advisor’s letter, sprinkled with words like informal and independent, was offset by underlying chords of words like probation and tête-à-tête and self-directed learning (all of which had for D’aron become slang for watching Oprah, itself slang for porn, itself slang for the visiting German professor’s stats class, itself slang for beer, itself slang for a few drinks, itself slang for bar crawl, itself slang for … You get the point). When he finally summoned the nerve to meet her, it was nearly spring break, nearly midterms, and at every desk in the César Chávez Center students turtled over laptops. He had applied himself with determination in the few weeks since meeting the other Little Indians, and carried to the meeting those few recent assignments on which he had earned a B or better.

Mrs. Brooks occupied a small inside office whose only window was the sidelight beside the door. On her desk, family photos greeted all who entered. D’aron always found it hard to imagine people in authority with a family, arguing over Netflix and ice cream. She sat with her back to the hall, boxes of tissues piled high on her credenza, her face only inches from the computer screen displaying … was it MS-DOS?! When D’aron knocked she spun around and waved him in with a smile and a How-do-ya-do. Seeing that she was black, he turned to leave. Sorry, I’ll make an appointment. He wasn’t in the mood for an ass-chewing. No, no, no, no. Come in. He thought he detected a faint accent, but couldn’t be sure because once he gave his name, her expression grew stern and officious. I’ve been busy and stressed and am trying to do better, ma’am. She softened a bit, leaning back in her chair and sighing as if there was a big decision weighing on her, one she regretted being charged with making, like a soccer ref giving a red card to a favored player.

Let’s start at the beginning, D’aron. Is it Daron or Daron or Daron?

Daron, ma’am.

What about this apostrophe?

The name’s … Irish, he started to say before catching himself … The name’s misspelled. I never figured why it’s like that or how to git ’em to change it.

Where are you from, Daron?

He told her and she smiled. I’ll bet Berkeley has more students than there are people in your entire town.

Yes’m.

It was the same for me when I first came here from Tennessee, too long ago to tell you. I’ll just admit that when I was an undergrad here, twittering was for the birds. Even now, back home anyone who tweets too loudly is likely to end up plucked, stuffed with spicy pork sausage, and served with cornbread.

They both laughed.

She leaned forward and whispered, I’m from a holler.

My backyard backs right up to one. Daron settled into his seat. It was the first time he’d met anyone in California who was from a holler. Most people didn’t even know what it meant, and he’d stopped explaining because too often they’d ask why he couldn’t be like everyone else and call it a valley.

Look, Daron, it’s a big school. It’s an achievement and an honor for you to have made it this far, so don’t sabotage yourself. If you need help, ask. There are too many students in some of these classes, and it’s only going to get worse; however, the school is committed to seeing first-generation college students succeed. But you have to ask for help. No one is going to offer it.

Yes’m.

And you have to stay on top of your work. It’s not high school.

It sure ain’t. I didn’t even have to study much in high school. I could show up for the test and—

—A lot of students fall prey to that mistake. It’s not as easy as you thought, so then you kind of check out. You start asking yourself crazy questions about your intellectual abilities.

Daron’s face burned and he looked away.

Then your grades plummet, and you start to wonder if you even belong here, or if it’s a mistake, or if you were a sympathy admit.

Daron looked at his shoes, unable to hold her gaze. He had wandered up to that idea on many occasions, but never explored it at length, treating it like a street he mustn’t cross. Why had Berkeley accepted him? Candice had gone to a small public school in Iowa, but her parents were professors. Louis was Asian, so he possessed the magic membership card. Charlie was black, but he went to some fancy boarding school on a football scholarship. Then there was Daron.

If you were accepted, you deserve to be here.

At that, Daron started to cry, and as he did so, he admitted that he sloughed off for the first couple months of each semester, planning to pull it out of the bag at the last minute, but also thinking that if he failed at least he couldn’t be blamed because he hadn’t studied. He knew it was crazy, and couldn’t explain how he knew, but he knew nonetheless that somehow his ego had tricked him into adopting this strategy so he wouldn’t be disappointed. He had seen this as clearly as a drive-in movie screen against a starless sky, the insight cruelly ambushing a fine Friday-night buzz, and so he refrained from sharing with Mrs. Brooks the specific circumstances surrounding a revelation she deemed preternatural. He told her about high school, which he had burned in effigy shortly after graduation but now missed terribly because he had been on top, at least academically, while here he was average at best. She handed him a tissue. How his entire high school graduating class would jeer—Faggot!—if they saw him all snotty-nosed in California in this black lady’s office, except Jo-Jo, who wouldn’t have laughed at all, who woulda told D’aron, in that regretful tone he used for both bad and good news, I warned you, they ain’t like us. And if Daron didn’t succeed, after flaunting UCB back home, after defying his father’s wish that he become a Bulldog, after applying to Cal in secret, he would never be able to return home to B-ville, and would end up like those homeless kids on Telegraph—wouldn’t he?—with only other homeless kids and mangy dogs for friends, and he saw how people looked at them. He felt idiotic admitting this, especially when she chuckled.

Mrs. Brooks stifled her laugh. Daron, honey, those are not ex-students. Those are people getting an early start on an unusual career. Don’t you worry; no matter what, you’ll never end up like that. You come from a good family.

A line had formed in the hall while they were talking. Mrs. Brooks pushed the box of tissues across the desk. Take a minute to get yourself together. I know it’s hard, sugar, I know it’s hard.

I just want to fit in.

I know, dear. You said they spelled your name wrong?

Yes, ma’am. All wrong.

I’ll take care of that for you. You just focus on your work and let Mrs. Brooks know if you need anything, and remember, you deserve to be here as much, if not more, than everyone else. Repeat that.

I deserve to be here.

That’s right. You come back and see me every day if you need to. In the meantime, there are over one hundred student organizations here at Cal. Whatever your interests or beliefs, you can find a like-minded group.

He left relieved to have learned he was not alone in his anxieties, feeling unburdened of a load he had not fully comprehended the enormity of, much as he had felt after his first real sex ed class (not that makeshift tutorial Quint choreographed wherein a hot dog rousted an unsuspecting chicken). He also found himself wishing, he noted with puzzlement, that more professors were black. He understood them, it seemed, and they him. All the way back to Unit 2, he repeated Mrs. Brooks’s mantra. I deserve to be here. I deserve to be here. I deserve to be here. He also resolved to find a like-minded group. All of this he did while wearing empty headphones so as to appear to be singing.

BACK HOME IN B-VILLE, GA, the 4 Little Indians would stand out like J. Crew rejects, but in Berkeley they were just four friends, four inseparable friends, four constant companions, so close that he wondered if siblings could be closer. No, explained Charlie when the subject was raised. I love my brother and all, but it’s not like we actually talk. We didn’t even do that after my dad died.

That was Charlie, wise beyond his years. But they were all savvier than Daron. Louis taught him hard-learned lessons like the wisdom of avoiding edibles after drinking. Candice taught him that one must never follow white with red. Once a month they did medicinal 420 and communally fashioned quotes such as, How do we know stars aren’t just holes and God hasn’t just thrown a curtain over a cage? Their jointly constructed code word for weed aka grass aka Mary Jane: alien technology. Technology because it made them smarter. Alien just because. (Alien because it make my May-he-can real good, hombre, Louis liked to say.) On their languorous strolls the percussion of Daron’s flip-flops calmed him, and air running between his toes formed fins that climbed his back and combed his hair into lightning rods. And when they sprawled along the water at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park—lungs bursting between breaths, counting ducks as day hushed and short gusts soughed the bobbing grass along the bank, the longer stalks arcing over to nose the lake—passing headlights might brush Candice’s hair, the ponytail resting across one shoulder like a small animal while she absentmindedly stroked it, or sketch Charlie’s profile, his regal nose, his broad back exaggerated in shadow, or highlight Louis’s sneakers worn like slippers, his habit, when in thought, of axing the thin edge of his hand against his forehead, his hand in profile resembling a cockscomb. Daron (and not only at those moments, to be honest) desperately wanted to hug them all, and instead would settle for the huddles between bursts of Frisbee football.

It wasn’t all parties and drugs. There was also sex, or at least the promise of it, which led Daron to hang around the protests. With the exception of the lesbians, and who knew what they did, the women who engaged in protests were said to be the most sexually liberal, their politics freeing them to celebrate their sexuality without shame, supposedly. Daron, though, could never work up the nerve to start a conversation with somebody holding a banner that read EDUCATION IS AN INALIENABLE HUMAN RIGHT or chanting, Harvard had a Moor; we expect more of Cal, and so that second semester, his freshman spring semester, was all fits and starts, and he ended it as he began it, as he had ended his high school career, uninitiated into the mysteries of intimacy, though in the late-night cobalt glow of the bathroom stall he observed scores of demonstrations on his laptop, loading many to his hard drive. He was probably better off, having heard somewhere that herpes traveled swifter than Hermes, or at least that’s what he said to himself, but that’s not how he told it when he went home that summer.

IT’S NOT THAT DARON LIED, or intentionally misled anyone. The confusion was preordained; he didn’t even know it was happening. The other Little Indians tweeted and Facebooked all summer (or tagged and twitted, as Daron’s parents said anytime he was on the hall computer, that old tower that whined and whirred like even powering down was a burden). They begged him for photos, so he sent a few, of the quarry, of a fish his cousin Quint caught, of one of his mom’s cookouts, all, as he knew with tactical embarrassment, much less exotic than his friends’ snapshots, no matter how much they liked the images, liked the way Pickett Rock was frog-shaped unless you approached it from the south, from which angle it resembled an eagle, liked the shimmering bass curled in retreat from the sun, liked the squat sausages nestled on the grill like chubby kids at their first sleepover, huddled against the dark. Charlie was filing cleats at some fancy upstate New York university football camp, followed by an Airstream to Scottsdale with his high school friends. Louis was visiting family in Kuala Lumpur, and had been to the tallest twin towers in the world (Daron skipped that photo). Candice was in Provence with her parents, trying to dread her hair, from the looks of it. It was these pictures he showed his friends at home, and several from the school year: All 4 Little Indians under Berkeley’s famous Sather Gate, in line at Memorial Stadium before the big game against Stanford, in The City at the Golden Gate Bridge. Always places where there were plenty of bystanders to take their picture. Always with Candice standing between Daron and Charlie while Louis crouches in his prison pose. He’d never considered the implications of those group shots until Jo-Jo, whom Daron still considered his best friend, asked him about the juniors.

What?

You prinking? Don’t get shy on me now.

They were at the edge of unincorporated Braggsville at Point Pen Dry Bluff, a granite scarp—dubbed The Balcony—from which they’d often Geronimoed into the cool blue twenty feet below, much to the horror of more than one shrieking mother. Earlier that morning, Jo-Jo had asked him to take a ride, which they did in silence, which meant that Jo-Jo wouldn’t admit what was on his mind until he’d cracked at least three High Lifes. Jo-Jo was one of those guys who would snap his fingers and complain—Look here, Cochise, I’m trying to talk to you—even when he wasn’t saying anything. Unlike Quint, who’d inherited from his mother a tongue that could talk a gray sky dry, Jo-Jo measured his words like he was underwater. Matter of fact, with that short, perpetually wrinkled brow, he always looked like he was holding his breath. When Jo-Jo said nothing after the fourth can, except to ask about the juniors, Daron felt a guilty rush of relief and repositioned himself to better appreciate the view. It wasn’t called The Balcony for nothing. Mayor Buchanan, who owned the land, years ago had his earthmovers carve the best-lit ledge into a shallow, beach-like slope lined with smooth pebbles, all at his own expense. Now all four Rhiner girls—woman-sized by middle school to the one—lay splayed head to head, spread-eagle, as if to catch more sun. The Rhiners were there when Daron arrived, so maybe Jo-Jo knew this and planned to hang out and enjoy the natural scenery.

Like a snowflake. Jo-Jo pointed.

Or dream catcher. Or, thought Daron, a tête-à-tête, at last recalling the word.

Or semen catcher.

That, too. Daron adjusted his trunks. The youngest sister had been Chinese skinny when he left for college, but now cut quite the figure. She had a split in her bib damn near deep enough to hide a baby.

So, she ever put a finger up in the juniors? asked Jo-Jo.

What?

Don’t get shy on me now.

Daron shrugged.

Ever got that velvet rabbit when she was on the warpath?

Huh?

Miss Iowa. When she’s scalping.

Yeah.

When Jo-Jo first saw the pictures of the 4 Little Indians, he’d tweaked Daron’s titty as if to say, Good job, hoss. The suggestion had indeed pinched Daron at the time, but he had ignored it. He now regretted not correcting Jo-Jo, but at the same time considered this scenario kin to noticing before anyone else that his own fly was undone. Why call it to everyone’s attention? Yeah, Daron repeated.

You crack those juniors and get up in that wormhole yet?

Yeah.

She ever swallow your Johnny Appleseed?

Yeah.

Ever blew dice so hard she fell off?

Yeah.

Jo-Jo laughed. Hmmm. Might be I ought get outta Draggsville. Go to college.

Don’t see why not.

Might could, but won’t, ’cause it costs, and I mean to be paid.

Yeah.

Old man say I can make foreman in two years. Tells me he seen it happen that quick. Get out of the oven, get over to the saw.

Yeah.

Hmmph. Jo-Jo pointed. Through the pines the mill could be seen in parts: the circuit board of ducts and compressors atop the big brick hotbox where it always felt about ninety million degrees and some distance away the sawtooth roof of the shipping warehouse where the greatest hazards were paper cuts and losing hair to packing tape. From where they sat on The Balcony, they couldn’t see the building that connected the two—the rib—a low-windowed, narrow block structure where the air-conditioned offices were located. Everyone Daron knew spoke of the saw like Canaan. None aspired to the rib, almost as if it was cursed, almost as if it didn’t exist for them, almost as if they went outside and walked around it to get from one end of the compound to the other. Jo-Jo elbowed Daron. The Rhiner girls were peeling themselves off the ground with arched backs, yawns, outstretched arms, and then took to the water with a battle caw, cutting air fifty yards out to Pickett Rock, giggling off the warm sting as they settled on the boulder’s edge, juniors rocking, feet exciting the water, legs exciting the boys, especially where the stringy denim rode high thighs like fine blond hairs.

My father’s at it again.

Sorry, muttered Daron after a moment during which, even after a year at Berkeley—including a special student-led DCal class on interpersonal communication—he could think of nothing else to say.

Daron brushed the rocks from his bottom as he scooted back out of the sun and onto a smoother shelf of granite. The heat wasn’t hearing it, though, and like Georgia humidity was wont to do, the mugginess shadowed him. No one sunned at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park, and the reservoir was polluted, but what it lacked in bikinis, it made up for with decriminalized alien technology and near-perfect Mediterranean weather. Unlike the gorge. Never mind the chain links of light reflecting onto Pickett Rock or gliding metallic along the sandy bed where the lake was shallow, or the buff scent of pine resin, or the empties whistling green and gold as the workers on the far side buckled shut their lunch buckets, he knew what Jo-Jo meant by his father being at it again.

Jo-Jo’s father could be up to any Old Scratch tack, from moonraking, to knocking noggins around the yard, to putting the shine on old Martha Redding down at the Pik-n-Pak, to trying to creep a peek at June Tucker’s butterfly. It was Jo-Jo’s father, in fact, who had told both boys about his infamous and eponymous courtship kung fu move: Just let me stick the tip in, baby. Daron’s own father had told him nothing about sex except to use protection because, Loose lips really do sink ships, and nothing will sink your ship faster than a kid or a disease. Daron’s grandfather, Old Hitch—whom Nana called, in sooth, My right minder—offered the only sober advice: Remember, ripe fruit is always marked down. Gotta see something in ’em they can’t see for ’emselves. Don’t lie, but you gotta be a real generous mirror. (Back in ninth grade, Slater Jones from 4-H said only: I don’t have sex, I make babies. Remarkable prescience for a fourteen-year-old, hence this parenthetical.)

The water clapped below as the girls abandoned their perch. Pickett Rock was chalky where dry and black where wet, so that the wet parts, once the last Rhiner slapped water, were like the shadows of dancing figures, and Daron was reminded of a tenth-grade lesson on Nagasaki, after which the teacher had been transferred out faster than a mad cow. She had read to the class a first-person account by a survivor who was lucky enough to be not only swimming, but also submerged when the blast passed over him. After seeing the flash reflected in the pool, he surfaced to discover that where his friends had once stood only their twisted silhouettes remained, draped on the ground like shadows, forgotten clothes, except white not black. With no frame of reference for such a phenomenon, he could only imagine a bizarre prank, so bizarre that he didn’t immediately notice the damage to the pool house or that the water he trod now felt near boiling. The survivor said he could take no credit for it, that it was preordained that he would live and his friends would die, and he would never understand why. All he knew was who. Who is who? asked the teacher, closing the book with a resolute thump and letting her readers jangle from their rattling beaded-glass tether. It’s us. Japan was ready to surrender as early as the defeat at Midway.

Jo-Jo dragged a heavy hand across his eyes. Now what about those juniors?

Yeah, Daron repeated, nodding, certain that it couldn’t matter because Berzerkeley and Braggsville were two worlds always on opposite sides of the sun.

Chapter Five

His sophomore fall was without incident, but halfway through his sophomore spring, everything changed. As Quint would say, his pancake got flipped. The class was American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives. The course reader, peopled with notables such as Freire and Marx, was book-ended by Chomsky and Zinn. The 4 Little Indians had taken the class together to satisfy a core requirement and because they heard it was fun, or at least that’s what they told each other. The professor wore a monocle and resembled Mark Twain, and, better yet, video projects were accepted as capstones.

The first day of class the professor shepherded the students through the maze of Dwinelle Hall and down the front stairs, broad as a stage, across the plaza where Mondays through Wednesdays a man lay on his back all day with his bicycle across his chest like a security blanket, his arms and legs clawing the air in slow motion like an upturned turtle; and into the grand lobby of Wheeler Hall, where an elderly blond man wearing a kung fu gi and curly-toed shoes like a court jester practiced tai chi, his ragged braid gently sweeping his yellow belt: and ending in the Grinnell Grove, where upon a fallen blue gum eucalyptus a bearded man lunched each day wearing Indian dress and twelve multicolored berets stacked on top of his head like a Dr. Seuss character. The point? By the end of the semester, the professor hoped they would be able to tell him.

On Fridays, the professor hosted Salon de Chat, an informal class with the tagline: People who don’t know their history are doomed to eat it! The desks were arranged as four-tops covered with butcher paper and a sandwich board was installed in the hallway. Their bistro, like all classrooms on the south side of Dwinelle Hall, overlooked a thin creek spanned by a wooden footbridge and straddled by a tree shed that blocked the worst of sound and sun. The first few weeks of class, Daron arrived early to ensure a seat near the window from which he could observe the world four stories below—the students eating along Strawberry Creek, rushing to and from the Bear’s Lair café, hustling through the breezeway leading to the bookstore—and imagine himself already a Berkeley graduate; a king of industry on high appointment in his city club; a Carnegie, but a true philanthropist. In his employ even the cafeteria worker who napped where the roots had riven the retaining wall and the earth opened into alcove would be warmed by his generosity. (He would never forget that workingmen, like his father, carried this litter, as the prof called it.) This fantasy lasted only so long as he was alone and soon gave way to fancying that the students tromping in behind were assembling to hear him speak. That whimsy he could retain only until hearing chalk scrape, sometimes a screech as anguished as a balloon at the edge of constraint.

He then was back in 512-A, a narrow classroom with chalkboards on the long walls and, on the ceiling, cocked fluorescent fixtures with those damned baffling fins, Candice never seated beside him. Those fantasies lasted only the first few weeks because by then it was apparent that the professor thought it impossible for a rich man to be a good man. Salon de Chat, though, was always fun. After being assigned to a table of three or four diners, each student received a menu of conversations.

SALON DE CHAT

Starter

Civil Disobedience

Entrée

Tradition and Social Justice

Dessert

Uncivil Disobedience and Protest

As usual, Daron and Charlie sat together, and Louis sat elsewhere with Candice. How Louis always managed to partner with Candice, Daron had not yet figured out. The prof lurched from table to table, ears out, eyes to the floor, finger to the ceiling, nodding, rarely talking, more a mascot than a teacher. Daron was still unaccustomed to this practice, most common among humanities professors, of mm-hmming more than speaking, which was the exact opposite of high school.

Laughter shot across the room. From Louis’s table. His three partners were all doubled over, and Louis wore his famous face of fatuity, eyes wide, mouth straight and slightly open, head back like he’d narrowly missed a slap, an expression that asked, Did I say something?

At Daron’s table, a junior from L.A. blathered about documentary filmmaking as the next social protest movement. Documenting protests, that is. A performative intervention, she explained, drawing the words out like a foreign term. Read Mark Tribe. She had hair blonder than Beyoncé’s (her dyed coif quite unlike, he imagined, her Southern cousin’s) and he doubted she could read anything through those sunglasses, maybe not even without.

Another volley of laughter from Louis’s table. Candice was literally crying, her mascara fanning like Tammy Faye’s. Why had she started wearing so much makeup? Last semester, she wore none, to honor her Native heritage.

L.A. continued her litany of the merits of documentaries.

Vous n’êtes pas sérieux? What is performative intervention? That could be sex, or shoplifting. Daron counted the options out on his fingers. Is sex or shoplifting going to change the world? Better yet, how ’bout shoplifting sex?

That would be rape. And that is not funny. That is very serious. Failing to believe the humor in that remark, I’m departing for another table. L.A. stood then, but not before daintily counting out three index cards on her seat. There are my notes for the next two courses. That should cover my portion of the bill.

She strutted off, shorts nibbling cheeks, perfectly painted legs tucked into huge furry boots, like she was wearing the feet of a baby wooly mammoth.

Daron clambered to his feet, but Charlie extended his arm like a parent coming to a sudden stop. She’ll be back.

Daron muttered his agreement. He believed Charlie. There was never a shortage of girls volunteering to be in Charlie’s group, and he wasn’t even on the football team, he only looked like it.

She was here until the shoplifting sex part. You can recover as long as you don’t apologize or follow her now. Saying sorry would be giving up the advantage.

Daron considered this. If that was the case, he should draft an official apology. Forget La-La Loosey, as they called her. He had forgotten about Kaya, his freshman obsession, it was now Candice who inflamed him. The way she laughed, like she had a big appetite.

Daron ignored the fun being had at Louis’s table. Louis probably could have gotten away with a shoplifting sex comment.

The professor chose a replacement from the five coeds who volunteered and soon they were again picking at their appetizer, but they would not have room for dessert because for their entrée someone mentioned reenactments. A few people were surprised to hear that a professor at Brown was holding reenactments of famous civil rights demonstrations. The immediate consensus: It was a joke. It had to be ironic.

They have a reenactment every year in my hometown, announced Daron.

That can’t be serious, piped La-La from her new table. Vous n’êtes pas cereal.

Pull, Daron mumbled, borrowing Louis’s skeet-inspired euphemism for shooting the bird. They’re real cereal.

A reenactment? ¿Por qué? ¿Por qué? Candice groaned as if someone had run a fat baby up a flagpole. ¿Por qué? ¿Por qué? was her way of saying: Why? … No! That’s not why. Have a seat. I’ll tell you the real reason, whether you want to know or not. Worse yet, her conversations had astral bodies, as Louis joked. They’d be hearing about this for weeks (as they had been about Ishi).

And she was not the only one. The table was shocked. The entire class in fact. They’d heard tell of Civil War reenactments, but they were still occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still sharecropping? What about indoor plumbing? Like an old Looney Tunes skit, Tex Avery tag ensued. Charlie gawked at Louis, who gawped at Candice, who generously suggested it as a capstone project to the professor, who Googled the event and announced that it coincided with spring break, Serendipity has spoken.

Candice’s eyes were still pinwheeling as they had when she’d learned about Ishi, last of the Yahi. In 1911, that wild Indian wandered into Oroville, CA, where he was caught stealing meat. ¿Por qué? Because, according to Candice, Ishi was driven to desperation by California’s Gold Rush–financed Indian removal campaign. Seeing as how the locals didn’t take neatly to theft, the sheriff took Ishi into custody for Ishi’s own protection. ¿Por qué? Because, according to Candice, Ishi’s scalp alone was worth $5 U.S. After reading about Ishi in the paper, a kind UC anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber became Ishi’s benefactor, and installed Ishi in a comfortable apartment in the Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. ¿Por qué? Because, according to Candice, Ishi wasn’t considered fully human. This was institutionalization, no different from being imprisoned or placed in a zoo. And, according to Candice, a Civil War reenactment was little better. She insisted they spend the break in Georgia recording the reenactment. Because!

About this idea Daron felt as he had during that first face-off with sushi. No matter what Candice said, mixing boiled eggs into chicken salad was not the same as dropping a dollop of roe on raw tuna! Not at all! Not when eating, not the next morning. And wasabi? That word sounded like a scourge for the soul as well as a torment for the tongue. But, because they were enthusiastic, and Candice suddenly so interested in him, and the entire class chanting, Go for it; because at that moment seventeen students were hunger striking in response to the reduction in funding for Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and African American Studies; because it was Berzerkeley, dammit to Hades, Daron couldn’t say no. He didn’t say yes, but couldn’t yet say no. Never mind that at home, his friends would have half considered—briefly—a hunger strike only if it meant getting classes canceled, not added. Never mind that he had never actually ventured onto Old Man Donner’s grounds while the reenactment was being staged. Never mind that the notion of recording morphed into participation.

But mind he did when Candice suggested a performative intervention, or, in Louis’s words, a staged lynching. Daron protested that lynching never happened in his town.

That’s even better! The prof clapped his hands softly, his right eye red-rimmed from the monocle. You can force States’ Rights to take a look in the mirror and they will not like what they see. Will this be safe? There won’t be any danger, will there?

The class looked at Daron expectantly, all twenty-nine eyes.

He snorted. What did they think Georgia was like? Of course not! There’s no danger at all. It’s safe. The reenactment is open for public viewing. It was decided then, in the wink of a cat’s eye. Next month, spring break, would not see him in Tijuana or Los Cabos or Guadalajara enjoying tacos, Tecate, and tequila with other Berkeley students, though perhaps there was still a chance of dissuading them. During the walk from Wheeler Hall to Foothill, he wasn’t sure he wanted to dissuade them, not with Candice at his arm, Please-please-pretty-pleasing him to tell her all about Braggsville, which there was ample time to do because it was uphill all the way. He savored every step, every time she touched his elbow, every time she exclaimed with disbelief, every time she waved her hands like flippers, which she did when excited.

At first Candice had not seemed different from the girls he went to high school with, didn’t look any different, but her enthusiasm distinguished her, and once committed, her zeal was of a predacious intensity. She would be, in Quint’s words, Hard to wife.

If I were Southern, Candice whispered, I’d be real angry about that kind of history being celebrated. She repeated herself, the words again spoken softly, almost hummed.

Daron heard her as surely as if she had screamed. (What had Nana always said? The good Lord speaks with fire on tongue but man heeds man’s counsel only when spoken softly, almost sung.)

I’d plan something big, really big, she added, just as quiet as the first time.

Their plan: Three of them would dress as slaves, one wearing a harness under his clothes. One would act as the master, cracking a whip and issuing random, absurd orders. They assumed there would be enough rocks or branches nearby to form a pile for the slaves to carry back and forth. While this was happening, they would run a hidden camera and record the reenactors’ reactions and ask them a few questions about the war, local history, and the reenactments. Then the slave wearing the hidden harness would get uppity, maybe make some untoward comment about the lady of the plantation or try to run off or just complain that there wasn’t enough salt in the food. Then the party would get started. That slave would be hoisted from a low limb as if lynched. They debated whether or not to hang Charlie. Louis argued that using the Veil of Ignorance as a guide meant lynching a white person, ideally a white female, pretty, blond, because they were the most treasured people in the whole, wide world, if not the entire known and unknown universe, in this life and the next, in this dimension—Charlie cut him off, worried that might provoke gunfire, that most people were ignorant of the Veil of Ignorance, so it wouldn’t work. Candice had said (parroted Charlie, really), It is what it is. They should call a spade a spade. At that the debate came to a halt.

Maybe we should do a practice run? Remember that quote from the Gold Rush? From that Pierson Reading guy? “The Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the Negro in the south. For a mere trifle you can secure their services for life.”

Daron remembered it all right, but didn’t think it had anything to do with Braggsville. He felt indignation rising as one of Nana’s sayings came to ear: Don’t curse a child for doing childish things, but don’t ’courage him none neither.

Chapter Six

¿Por qué? ¿Por qué? ¿Por qué?

Porque it was her idea to ride Medusa—Because! Because! Because! Nonetheless! Understandably!—it was her idea to ride Medusa; because when she whispered in your ear that foggy A.M. in that class that only you two share, that morning after—OR but days after—that party when YOU dressed in vintage polyester and pleather like the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and paraded down Bancroft Ave á la East Bay Story, a new itch stitched YOUR ribs; because when she whispered, beeswax binding her riotous golden dreadlocks, bundled solid, squat enough to pinch you with envy, of course you thought FUCK calculus, FUCK history, FUCK ethnic studies, and not at all metaphorically; because when she whispered, voice riding up from her gut, wearing the sun like a saint, hair riding the air as she turned to you, you envisioned Legend of the Overfiend, bukkake, that fifth-grade slide on conception, now most immodest; nonetheless, YOU are forgiven because she routinely refers to herself in the third person by her First Peoples name or her Tibetan name or her Burner name; understandably forgiven by even the sardonic professor who, midmarker, raised only his left eyebrow when you pressed cracked lips to hand after Goldilocks whispered, Haven’t you ever wanted to ride Medusa?

Then THEY texted you. Couldn’t back out then, even if you wanted to—Because! Because! Because! Nonetheless! Understandably!—your heart exploded like a watermelon being eaten by an elephant.

And so YOU are at Six Flags in Vallejo. Va-yay-ho! Screams overhead; fluorescent math problems ride the sky. Vallejo was once the home of the Miwok, Suisunes, and the Patwin, a Wintun people, according to her. In 1850, the government drafted plans to build a new city within the city, a well-appointed capital district complete with a university and botanical garden, according to her. This gilt municipal zone was to be called Eureka, according to her. The irony is lost on you. The irony is not lost on you, but neither is it found. And you, Ferric, you say. A wink your reward. A tickle in your gut, shame, because that’s how it always is, Banks loan quickest to those who least need money. Celaka!! Fuucked up, you say. You don’t know what a ferret has to do with anything, but you’ll, Ferret it out, you promise, you’ll have that vayay-ho, that va-jello, that earthy gash, your own Eureka.

But first you tried to eat, Charlie and his Macho Nachos, Candice and her Paddle Handle Corn Dog (could the universe be more unfair?), Daron and his Smokehouse burger, and Louis and his Totally Kickin’ Chicken, which he pushed away after two bites, I’m throwing in the chopsticks. Was it nerves, or was it that centered on the picnic table marred with initials carved, etched, and drawn, and stained with mustard and food scraps, sat a fluttering stack of memorial brochures doctored by Candice—Adbusters-style complete with new photos—to extoll the virtues of the Six Flags Graveyard, and one box of ashes. The remains of Ishi, if asked.

Chapter Seven

Was this what Mrs. Brooks meant by a like-minded group? How did he get into Berkeley anyway? Professors, students, Miss Lucille—that dining hall attendant who always complimented his manners—even Daron himself. They all wondered, he knew, especially hearing his Friday-night accent, you—fermented—becoming a long y’all, and ain’t rearing its ugly head before, worse yet, being distilled into ’ant. He could reckon the direction of the wheels turning in their heads: budget cuts plus more out-of-state fart-sniffer students equals lower standards. They were wrong, and if they dared ask, he’d say so. Unlike some of them, he’d done it on his own. No college counselor, no private consultant to groom and polish his applicant profile, no practice admissions interviews. Hard work, summer school, and all the AP he could eat were his salvation, the price of his admission. That, and he wrote a damned fine application letter.

He had revised for weeks, reading every Wikipedia entry on writing, watching every YouTube video on the application process, some links provided by the school, others he found on his own, checking out every book of cover letters from the library. He even ordered online, with his lunch money, a book entitled 100 of the Best Application Essays Ever! He consulted, at their insistence, his father and his AP English teacher. His father’s advice: Tell the truth. A man’s word is his only honor, and honor is the only currency that never needs exchanging. His English teacher’s advice: Teachers spend most of their lives reading piss-rich attempts at mind reading. Distinguish yourself in writing by being completely yourself and speaking your piece, even if your opinion runs contrary to the popular position, in fact, more so in those instances. D’aron had done just that, at the end, working in secret.

Freshman applicant prompt:

Describe the world you come from—for example, your family, community or school—and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

Dear _______ Application Committee,

I am submitting respectfully this essay written for your perusal.

If we were a TV show, we’ d be a soap opera. If we were a musical, we’ d be a rock opera. But, in real life, we’re a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet.

I was born into a working-class family in the heart of Georgia. My mother’s family was Irish and my father’s family was descended from coal miners. They never had much, but we worked hard and made our way up. Mostly everyone works for the Kenny Hot Air factory where they make motors for the hand dryers used all across our great United States of America. The Davenports and the McCormicks never got along until my folks were married. We believe in diversity and multi-cultural-ism.

My father wanted to go to college, but after coming back from Honorably serving his country in the First Gulf War, the GI Bills weren’t any use because he had to work and couldn’t commute seventy-five miles each way to the nearest community college. Now he is a floor manager and enrolled to earn an online degree in business because capitalism is the future of the world and even China realizes that now, after what Reagan did to Russia and Germany.

My community is working class. When we get together each summer for the annual town picnic, we all share food and really we’re like one big community. We have the most Special Forces soldiers in all of the state per capita. We don’t have a school in town or a college nearby. The nearest community college is 75 miles away and the high school is in the next town.

My town is small, only 700 people, so I had to be bused to school. I integrated well and managed to get along with everybody. I was captain of the debate team and I once saved my grandmother after she was lost in the woods for three days with cancer. It was a scary time.

We’re blue collar, but proud and my family supports the American spirit and the freedom we’re bringing to the middle east, and our town has that same kind of spirit. We’re all red, white, and blue underneath.

I want to major in political science, bio-engineering, and bio-technology because people require peace, parsimonious food, and hygienic water. We also need to protect the earth. Ecology is the future. Not a day goes by when we don’t see a volcano erupting or an earthquake. Global warming is debasing the atmosphere and only we can prohibit it.

I am also interested in education because we need better schools and no child should be left behind. The children are the future. After I graduate, I will also teach. My town needs a summer camp that doesn’t involve hunting and camping and whittling. Trees have rights, too. It should involve things to prepare you for the real world, like math and science and computers.

That is why I am applying to ______________. _____________ has the best programs in these majors. Every time I read the paper, I see someone from _____________ being quoted in the news and giving scientific evidence and explanations for how we can make the world a better place for everybody. That’s how I know that ______________ is the school for me.

Prompt for all applicants:

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

One day I was down at Lou Davis’s Cash-n-Carry Bait Shop and Copy Center, where the slogan is “You Want Credit, Come Back Tomorrow.”

I was after gum, but killing time. It’s dim in there, the only light comes off the iceboxes. Ever since I was little I liked to stand there in the blue glow and pretend I was on a spaceship. That day it was hot, so hot I had to walk to cool down. I walked along the big fridge and freezer, feeling the chill, and saw all the venison sausage and souse and Georgia hash, which was all pretty cheap, cheaper than Jimmy Dean, but more than it would really cost to hunt. I added up the cost of the shells, and the gun, and the time, and the deer lick, and the beer, and whatever else. They’ d just built a Super Walmart two towns over, and I thought about how you could track out all day after a deer, or you could shoot up to Super Walmart or Lou’s and be back in a couple hours with all you needed for a week.

So I decided I didn’t need to hunt anymore. It didn’t make sense.

Now understand that my hometown has produced more Special Forces soldiers per capita than any other town in America.

And when the season opens there’s more hunters out than trees can shake a leaf at. When the season closes, there’s still more hunters out than trees can shake sticks at. Everyone has trophies mounted over their mantels or the front porch and the first buck is a bigger occasion than the 13th birthday.

You got to understand we’re proud, and we respect prey drive. We put down dogs that don’t hunt.

So, I got more hell for this than for being a Battlestar Galactica fan or complaining that Lost was stupid. But I argued that we didn’t sew our own clothes even though there were still patches of wild cotton at the edge of the old Southerby Plantation and that we didn’t make our own shoes even though there was a dairy two exits up, and a hemp farm in the next county so we could make laces.

I’d been a scout all my life, all the way up to Eagle Scout, but hunting just didn’t make sense. I stuck with my guns and am proud of that decision to this day, even though everyone still teases me about it. I won’t repeat here the names they call me.

My father took it hard because that was the one thing we did together that my mom just wouldn’t go for. But he hasn’t given up on me, right now he’s snoring soundly, thinking that I’m pecking away at a letter to UGA.

Freshman applicant prompt:

(Revision)

Describe the world you come from—for example, your family, community, or school—and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

Dear Sir of [sic] Madam,

My mother helped me write several previous drafts of this personal statement. In them, we listed accomplishments such as the Eagle scouts, the volunteer work for the local Red Cross, and my membership (for one day) in the Braggsville Historical Preservation and Dissemination Society. We also listed my participation in several school organizations and the time I saved my cousin from drowning, saved a cat from a bird, and saved my grandmother from certain starvation when she wandered off into the Holler and got lost. I also claimed a long-term interest in about a dozen majors that aren’t even related.

I learned a good word in the process: logorrhea. Not only were those letters too long, and had too many fancy words, the biggest problem was I didn’t remember many of these things. I will not dare to question their veracity. It was my mother who spoke those words, mind you. But the fact that I could neither remember these renowned events with which my extended family regaled each other around the Green Egg, nor supply my own memories, explains exactly how my world has shaped my dreams and aspirations. As my cousin Quint would say, I’ve been worked over by a one-armed potter.

It is not a college admission board who I write at this late hour, long after the parental units have retired because I need to write this on my own, it is to a parole board that I write.

I love my family and my town. My parents never went to college, but have done right by me all their lives. They didn’t take my schooling for granted and they made me study and take summer classes, and made me read all those test-taking books because they wanted me to go to college, but neither could tell me what for, other than that I have to. And for years I never understood why I have to, especially when they want me to go right up the road. But I need to get out of shouting distance of this place where everyone secretly calls school, Juvie!, and openly calls prison, School!

So in addressing the parole board in this hearing I feel I must demonstrate that I have changed, that I have atoned for whatever sin caused me to be born in this partially dry county, that I have learned my lesson. And I have.

I have learned that no matter where you go to school, it’s what you do after school that counts. But, we don’t have an afterschool program. I have learned that kids from all different areas can get along if given a chance, but our schools rarely meet and have only limited contact with other schools. I have learned that sports can bring people of different races and colors together to work for a common goal, but I don’t play sports and we only have one team, and it has only one race on it. I have learned that with access to public health care people avoid dying unnecessarily painful and lonely deaths, but the nearest hospital is over 100 miles away.

I have learned all this from reading books and watching the History Channel and Discovery because my town is tiny. It isn’t even on most maps, and we never had a representative. All our lives we wanted to matter, and we’ve applied for the Special Olympics, the Georgia Games, and the Capital Seat, all to no luck. We’ve tried, but our resources are limited until someone invests something in us, like time and a little money and a little outside influence.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m like my hometown, and I need someone to take a chance on me so I can prove my worth. And, I also would really like the chance to experience in person what I so far learned only on TV.

In regarding my major. There are over three hundred at Berkeley, and it’s hard to choose one when the most popular extracurricular activities here are 4-H, hunting, and Xbox. I like food and I observe that most people do as well. When the whistle blows at the mill the blacks go back to the Gully, the Mexicans to Ridgetown, and the Whites back here. But they all meet at the markets and after they talk about the weather, they exchange recipes. My parents are now making burritos and the Mexicans are eating headcheese, and for the best barbecue, Old Lou Davis has the biggest smoker and makes good pulled pork, but I’ve heard the Gully is where they have the best beef ribs. I think nutritional science and anthropology are my interests. To meet other people and learn how food can bring us together.

Thank you for considering my humble application.

I read on the YouTube advice link connected to the application page that we’re not supposed to end with a quote, especially from a book called “The Road Less Traveled.” Well, I guess I just did that anyway, but only to remind you that to get to some of my relatives we drive partway and walk the rest because they don’t have roads leading to where they live. (I hope you liked that.)

I gave up hunting and I’m a vegetarian and I think I’m ready to be released into society.

On another note, YouTube also said to be honest, so I must admit that the other reason I like UC Berkeley is because the only way I could get farther from home is to learn how to swim.

Sincerely,

Hopefully,

Daron Little May Davenport Class of ??!!

Daron stumbled across those letters shortly before Operation Confederation, as the 4 Little Indians had begun to call it. Rereading them he prickled with guilt.

I gave up hunting? I’m a vegetarian? I’m ready to be released into society? What was he thinking? Community? He’d never used that word so much in his life. Dear parole board! It was as though he had begged to be released from a cage of savage animals. What was wrong with hunting or eating meat? Nothing. Had he felt differently back then, or had he written what he thought they’d want to hear? He feared the worst. Even if it had felt honest at the time, he now recognized a shameful pleading, a palpable desperation, the stench of superiority.

Anxiety redoubled as self-reproach. Spring break was fast approaching, and he had better warn his mother. On the phone he asked her to request that Uncle Roy not use the N-word. His mother paused.

An word? she mused. Oh, in-words? Is that slang?

You know. Nigger.

Oh. Then louder, Oh! So you mean you are bringing friends. Okay, dear. I’ll make all the preparations.

And, ask, no, tell Quint not to make that Chinese joke.

What Chinese joke?

That thing he says that isn’t even funny. When Quint disagrees with something or someone, he says, Hell naw! Start that shit and next thing you know you’re Chinese. Not to mention—most definitely not to his mom—that to Quint, getting Chinese means getting high, and ordering Chinese means ordering dope.

Oh! You’re bringing home company. Don’t fret, D-dear.

Thanks, Mom. I owe you.

No charge, son, no charge. The full cost is no charge. She hummed for a moment her favorite Melba Montgomery song, No Charge. Don’t fret, dear, everyone will be on their best behavior.

And they would be. No one messed with his mother, who could stare a stone into sand. Could you also ask Dad to … well …

Yes, dear. We’ll move The Charlies.

The Charlies were what his father and grandfather called their black lawn jockeys, those two statues flanking the driveway, Serving with a smile. When referring to only one statue, they called it Tom, but together, and collectively, they were The Charlies. As in: Damned tractor went off the shoulder and took out my favorite Tom, they don’t make that size no more so I got to buy two new Charlies. As in: When are we lighting up The Charlies this year, Black Friday or December first? As in: Two Wongs don’t make a wang between ’em, but two Toms make The Charlies. He’d read both the Wikipedia and Uncyclopedia entries on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and found no connection. He knew it was supposed to be funny, but he never understood the joke, and didn’t think he wanted Candice or Louis or—good Lord, goodness, no—Charlie asking for an explanation about The Charlies. Charlie would take it in stride and Louis would say something funny, but Candice would go astral as she had after learning that Ishi meant man, that it was against Yahi custom to tell outsiders your name, that Ishi had no formal Yahi name because there were no surviving members of Ishi’s tribe to name Ishi, that Ishi therefore meant Ishi. She had, as Quint would say, gotten a red-eyed bull up her ass about Ishi, and Ishi wasn’t even alive.

Chapter Eight

¿Por qué? ¿Por qué no?

Porque, as she explained it, Ishi is Yahi for man, Ishi is Yahi for Ishi.

Porque, as she explained it, there was a difference between apologizing and anthropologizing, and neither excuse the desecration of a body.

Porque, as she explained it, they were Ishi’s remains. They are Ishi’s remains. If a picture was a captured soul, what the fuck was a book of them, what the fuck was a history of one people written by another, except an imaginary menagerie, a colonial shadowbox, a little foot warmer for those cold-existential evenings, an amulet against those starless, soulless nights?

You understood none of it, except the part about the foot warmer, which you knew was a myth of Northern aggression, though you daren’t interrupt when the spirit combed her tongue.

Mengapa? Mengapa tidak?

Is that Malay? Uh, you know I don’t actually speak Malay, except for curse words, right?

Mengapa? Mengapa tidak?

Kerana, as she explained it, if everything’s symbolic, then everything’s real. Then when we spread these ashes in Vallejo, people will know. They will know that UC Berkeley, supposedly the best public university in the world, took a man and made him live in a museum like an Epcot Center attraction, that we’re all in prison. That this is what public schools are. People will ask questions. People will demand answers. They will find there are none, and that will be the beginning of a reckoning … (A nod at you.)

What you talking ’bout, Willis?

What I’m talking ’bout, Willis, she explained, is how could any decent human force the last living member of a tribe to live in a museum? Ishi, how Ishi must have dreamed at night, how Ishi must have dreamed. How Ishi must dream even now. Though the museum and Kroeber both promised that Ishi’s body would not be desecrated, Ishi was autopsied in defiance of Native custom, Ishi’s body cremated, and Ishi’s brain wrapped in deerskin and shipped by mechanical conveyance to the Smithsonian. Ishi! How Ishi must dream.

Candice was not reassured to learn that the Smithsonian repatriated the body. Would we commend a stock market swindler for repaying stolen funds? Plan A: We’re taking Ishi to Six Flags and we’re riding Medusa and we’re releasing Ishi at the summit, and …

¿Cómo? Bagaimana? How? A padded bra! With three pounds of ashes double-packed in eight lucky-ass Ziploc bags, duct-taped like Styrofoam padding lining a bike helmet inside a Victoria’s Secret triple-D underwire, she’d put the pied piper out of a job, or at least off of it: the Six Flags guard checking her bag didn’t see anything in that shadow, not the collapsed box that would be the urn, not the clutch of feathers, not the half pint of Old Grand-Dad, none of it. She had borrowed Charlie’s rugby jersey, and damned if a spontaneous folk etymology didn’t cleave your brain as scrum took on a whole new meaning.

(Is it that … could you be … are you … might you be predisposed to objectify women, to remain stunted in what one prof called abject masculinity? Are you unfit for the university, the universe where no one has a body? A shame you cannot name scores you. For one class last fall, you read Andrea Dworkin, Akasha Gloria Hull, Martha Nussbaum, and at least a dozen other feminist authors, including Naomi Wolf and John Stoltenberg, both of whom argue that even the idea of physical attraction is socially constructed, argue that no one is innately beautiful, argue that society just told you so—about certain people. You found, though, that the more you tried looking at Candice and not thinking about her as a body, but as a person, the more you thought about her body. And now this!)

So there you are. At the picnic table. The air at last out of Candice’s balloons; and right before lunch, YOU made extended trips to the bathroom and let some pressure out of yours. But your palms are sweaty, and your feet, and you avoid looking at the guards—who all stare at you—and the ride attendants, too, and you get it. You know what he means. You want to tell him you understand how it feels, but he will say for you this is only today, for me this is everyday, every day—watched, followed, harassed—everyday. But, still, you get it. You wish you knew what to say to him, how to begin the conversation. Instead, you let him sit next to her, which he does in silence, as do the rest of you until the agreed-upon time, eyes on hands, feet, legs, neck, everything but Candice, until show time, when YOU learn that nothing, no purses, no hats, and certainly no glossy cardboard boxes can accompany riders on the Medusa. Because. The attendant Pearl pointed to the sign overhead, a periodic chart of pictograms among which, Candice insisted, she saw no cardboard boxes. One hand on her hip, rocking heel-to-toe in her thick-soled grudge-green Doc Martens, Pearl lectured them on the many perils of high-speed travel in unpiloted vehicles. Ever seen a pair of AA batteries fly out of a camera and slam into someone’s face at 110 kilometers an hour? Know what a can of Mountain Dew can do at those speeds? A book? A Big Mac?

To Daron’s amazement, Candice didn’t try to persuade the attendant to change her mind. As the 4 Little Indians retreated, Candice snorted. All she had to say of Pearl was, She’d wear black nail polish if they let her.

COULD A BEAK BE TOO PINK? Daron wondered as they instituted a hasty plan B. After having been turned away from Medusa and discovering that the highest point in the park, the Volcano, was inaccessible to pedestrians, Candice swiveled her scope toward the heart, the center of the park, the fountain, a circular basin finished in stucco and slate and surrounded by tiny red flowers, a fount from which surged a curtain of mist shaped like an inverted Bundt pan and ribbed by a dozen sprouts of water, and from the center of that erupted three bronze dolphins imprisoned eternally in the hazy bell jar, their bowed bodies predicting long arcs, their eyes on points distant.

The sculptures had appeared to piss Candice off more than anything else. She had rounded the fountain twice, tracing a larger circle with her feet, her backpack clopping loudly whenever she stopped to stomp on the three spots where the dolphins would land were the miraculous to occur. Even the fucking statues want to be free! Hungry, and so tired, Louis and Charlie had taken a seat on a nearby wrought-iron bench. Daron stood midway between Candice and his buddies, between the bench and the fountain, feeling as he had all morning—like an emissary, an ambassador, the diplomatic hotline between squabbling republics. He had encouraged Candice not to give up, if it was important to her. He had encouraged Louis and Charlie to have patience when waiting in line, though he hadn’t expected Louis to interpret that as license to hold a conversation with Candice’s breasts (which she adjusted far, far too often for Daron’s liking). Lastly, he had waved them all together once Candice decided on a spot. Charlie and Louis staggered over with the enthusiasm of teen relations visiting Seventh-Day Adventists on a Saturday morning, taking stilted, robotic steps as if they had no ankles.

Candice arranged them in a semicircle around the cardboard urn, armed them each with ceremonial feathers, furs, and ornaments (all made of red paper, which Louis assured them was okay because Chinese people did that for funerals). Charlie had a Native bracelet he’d received as a gift. Louis donned a Burger King crown, the paper plumes willowed with gaudy jewels, glass trinkets he’d bought at one of Berkeley’s many bead stores. Candice wore a dream catcher around her neck right where her oversize crumb catchers had been earlier. She laid out an arc of smooth rocks between the three of them and Ishi’s urn, and two larger concentric arcs between Ishi and what she called, The Outside World. Atop Ishi she placed a paper tomahawk. I’ll read something I’ve found online. She waggled her phone. It will take maybe two minutes tops. On her cue they held hands and began to hum. Her only instruction being, Hum!, Daron was surprised that they quickly fell into harmony as surely as if they had rehearsed for weeks, and he felt a nervous thrill whenever someone glanced in their direction. She restarted reading her passage at least four times because every fifteen fucking seconds a kid dragged his mommy or his nanny or his daddy or sometimes, because it was California, his mommies, or more rarely, his daddies over to see, Oooooohhhh powwow. Candice always wanted the kid to hear the whole thing. She was like the teacher he’d had in eighth grade who believed, You can only combat absenteeism and truancy with love. If you were late, no matter how late, she’d catch you up on what had happened so far, stopping the entire class to greet every tardy student like the prodigal son. The only reason she wasn’t fired was because, Methuselah be damned, she could trick the sun into oversleeping, as Daron overheard a teacher say one afternoon at Lou’s.

Mrs. Price. That was her name. Eighth-grade D’aron—aka Mr. Davenport, aka Dim Ding-Dong, bka (better known as) Faggot—had always wanted to come in late enough so that for just a minute or two, Mrs. Price would devote all her attention to him and only him, and he would have a feeling all over that was a mix between a warm bath and rubbing his groin against the kitchen sink, which was unavoidable when reaching for the tap. Mrs. Price, smells so nice, Mrs. Price, let me taste your spice, Mrs. Price, let me juggle your dice—always snake eyes, must have come to Daron’s mind because he stood between Candice and Charlie, and the hand Candice’s held—and that hand only—was clammy, that entire arm warm and tingling as if it had fallen asleep and been violently awoken.

Like criminals, kids attract each other, and soon eight children sat in a row before them, clapping at the end of Candice’s every sentence. Fortunately, their parents appreciated the break and relaxed on nearby benches—close enough to watch their children, but not close enough to get a good look at our 4 Little Indians. One of the kids stared like Daron was somebody important, and he had to admit the kid was cute. From a passing first aid attendant—Whassup? From a short black kid pushing a broom—a nod. From a cute brunette driving the handicapped golf cart—a wave. From the fountain—Dribble dribble. Briefly, it all felt very natural. Then came Tweety Bird, whom Daron had never seen up close. Then came a Latina who stopped at the insistence of her two blond charges, twin boys about waist-years-old. The crowd had grown. The kids hummed along as best they could, harmonic as a holiday hymnody. Candice chanted:

You are the sparrow’s song, the crow’s caw

The rose’s fragrance, the spring thaw

In our hearts you live forever,

Children will celebrate your brave endeavors

And we’ll take strength from your resolve

Until we meet again in heaven above

Charlie squeezed Daron’s hand, motioning at the nearby twin boys. One twin did cartwheels while the other coyly reached for a paper feather. Candice hissed him away. The Latina in charge of the twins made an apologetic face, more so, it seemed, for her powerlessness than for the twins’ behavior.

But Tweety deserved the attention, now only yards to their left, her fluffy finger dragging through the air like that of a director shadowed in the stage wings, resigned to her cast’s tendency toward insurgency. But this Tweety, as Louis pointed out in an inching whisper, has a clitoris-colored tongue—a hot one—a clitoris-colored tongue with a soft groove as inviting as a warm hot dog bun. Behold the blessed velvety furrow! And this Tweety, much to Daron’s surprise, is too pink in the beak, too pink for him to be at the same time holding Candice’s hand, too pink for him to be at the same time having random memories of Mrs. Price, such as a vivid image of the scrumptious freckle centered in the cleft of her chin, peeking down the split in her bib, pink enough to threaten a hot and perhaps soon not-so-private bristling, and about this he feels that confusion, that particular confusion he felt after the first time he knew himself in the biblical sense and lay there for some long, huffing minutes, afraid to look down because he thought he’d peed in his hand. It was a particular confusion that provided the only reliable refuge against shame.

Again, Candice hissed away the twins, but these two Willy Wonka rejects were professionals and used their similarity to great advantage. One would dance, try walking on his hands, mime—anything to distract, while the other wreaked havoc, stealing other kids’ toys, poking children, both of them acting all around like midget assholes. Louis tried motioning to the nanny, and Candice shushed him. But I didn’t say anything. Shushed again. One twin danced wild in a scuba mask while the other snuck behind them again and grabbed the paper tomahawk, upsetting Ishi.

Was Daron the only one to notice that Tweety Bird’s eyelashes were too, too long, fine strokes tapering gently up and across the forehead, framing blue eyes almost as big as Candice’s? And again, that particular confusion; he couldn’t bear to look down, the hot bristling now a full-on shadow box, noun and verb, so he dropped to one knee right as the wind scooped Ishi up and along the sidewalk and to the wider world.

Ishi, Candice yelled, Ishi, we commend you to the wind.

Tweety, hand to her temple as if compressing a wound, caterwauled as if she tawt she taw a putty cat, stirring the crowd out of their enchantment. The audience politely danced the ashes off their feet and applauded. Tweety, hand still to mouth, scurried off as best she could, knees cycling as if pushing pedals, those canary clodhoppers working the ground like snowshoes.

Chapter Nine

At the San Francisco airport Charlie discreetly pulled Daron aside and asked if there was anything he needed to know, if he should expect more crazy-Colonel-Sanders types of people in Braggsville. After the Ishi Incident, the 4 Little Indians had been invited to eat with a charming Southern couple who, as promised, made the best fried chicken west of the Mississippi. The couple, by Daron’s mind, had exemplified Southern hospitality by sharing with the hungry Indians what food they had, by making space at their dining table for strangers. Was Charlie offended because that table had been plastic and they’d sat on metal folding chairs? Daron hoped Charlie wouldn’t be so particular when meeting his relations. My mother, warned Daron, despises people who wear shoes without socks, and anyone who eats non-finger-foods with their fingers, like picking up the last pea. They had a good laugh over that, at least Charlie did.

While Charlie, Candice, and Louis were fastening seat belts and returning chair trays to the upright and locked position, it dawned on Daron that though he’d asked his mom to move The Charlies, he’d neglected to mention the mammies from New Orleans, Salt and Pepper Climb on Cucumber, as well as the Bibinba, Zwarte Pieten, and Hajji Firuz dolls his cousins had picked up while stationed abroad, not to mention the Blackface Soap and Watermelon Whistler tins. And that strange guy with the big grin dressed in only a loincloth and turban. That they were antiques, that they were valuable, that they were gifts wasn’t going to make Candice feel any better about them.

It’s not that the Davenports had never had black people around their house before, or even a Chinese guy once, but never a Malaysian who looked Chinese to some and Indian to others, fancied himself black at times, and wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee; a preppy black football player who sounded like the president and read Plato in Latin; and a white woman who occasionally claimed to be Native American. They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person—No! At Berkeley we say handi-capable person—and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said. He had once placed a personals ad on Craigslist to recruit for those positions: Diverse social club seeking to make quota requires the services of East Asian, Jew, Hispanic, and handicapable individuals to round out the Multicultural Brady Bunch Troupe. All applicants must be visibly identifiable as members of said group. Reform Jews and ADHDers need not apply. Daron felt now as he had when people had started responding to that ad, that he couldn’t help but expect a spectacular disaster.

HARTSFIELD-JACKSON ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT was among the most active transportation hubs in the world, in some years ranked the busiest. Daron never claimed Atlanta as his own, nor did anyone at home, but when they landed, he acted as tour guide, sharing all he had read online, and there was much to tell, see, and do on the long journey from Terminal E to baggage claim. Modern art graced the terminals and African sculptures lined the underground walkway. Any kind of food could be found, or movies rented, or prayers proffered, but that’s not what captivated them, not what had Candice shy, Charlie bright-eyed, Louis agape, and Daron feigning indifference, affecting an at-home swagger.

Theyselves were porters, skycaps, desk agents. TSA and armed officers. Businessmen, mothers, families. Teens traveling alone. Clerks and janitors, not to mention the pianist entertaining diners in the international terminal food court. Waitresses, waiters. Flight attendants. Was that Waka and Gucci? A pilot even! Tall short fat. Pretty ugly glamorous. Theyselves were flamboyant and poised. Rambunctious and composed. Svelte and slovenly. But mostly middle class and well-to-do, from the looks of them. Atlanta’s nickname was well earned; a Chocolate City indeed it was.

Beyond baggage claim, the 4 Little Indians were equally mesmerized. Daron was reminded again how different Atlanta was from most of Georgia, and from Berkeley or San Francisco even. It was impossible not to notice when theyselves comprised more than 50 percent of the population (especially when they were only 3 percent of Berkeley). Circling the concourse in vehicles ranging from beaters to Beemers, but mostly the latter, their significant middle class was outdone only by their extensive upper-middle class. Charlie, Candice, and Louis stared in awe as an elegant middle-aged woman clicked past them, the fox staring back as she flung her stole over her shoulder while wheeling a Tumi to a red convertible Aston Martin, the engine idling like Lord of Misrule nuzzling the gate before that famous derby. The driver, of average height and build, greeted her with a kiss on both cheeks, leaning back between each one as if to get a look at her. It was impossible not to feel pleasure at their reunion.

Candice nudged Daron, Famous?

Who they were, Daron didn’t know; the driver was obviously no athlete and too old to be a rapper. This was normal for Atlanta. He’d even heard that southwest of the city was a vast tract of milliondollar-plus homes all owned by blacks, a fact he proudly shared. Welcome to the new South.

It’s like being Asian in SF, or it must be, Charlie mused aloud.

Daron was glad it was Charlie who’d said it.

Except it looks like they have more money here.

Daron’s mother nosed her boxy white Ford Bronco into the space behind the Aston Martin. She clapped with glee and skipped to greet her D’aron, smothering him in kisses. Don’t be embarrassed, they have parents, too. She affectionately greeted each of his friends with a kiss on the cheek.

Actually, Charlie doesn’t. Daron regretted how that sounded when Candice glared at him.

Is that so? She tilted her head and turned on her heels to face Charlie.

It’s my dad, ma’am.

So sad. She kissed him again, squeezing his arms. You’re a big boy.

Yes, ma’am.

See! She elbowed Daron. He didn’t wipe his off. Charlie is a young man with good home training. She turned to Charlie, You play football? Cutting her eyes at Daron, she added, Forgive me if I’m essentializing.

Whatever! Daron began loading the luggage into the car, starting with Candice’s Hello Kitty bag, which momentarily reminded him of Kaya, and he wondered what Kaya would make of this Atlanta place, as she liked to phrase things. More importantly, though, what would Candice make of Braggsville? Straining to heft an oversize duffel with Fu Manchu mustache patches sewn onto either end, he was surprised again that the distinction of having the largest bag went not to Candice, but to Louis, whose only explanation was, Stuff.

Your mom’s so friendly, Louis added.

Daron nodded glumly; handlebar-headed was more like it. She’s not normally so saccharine.

Before leaving Cali, they had agreed to speak French or Spanish as necessary for security, but Daron knew his mother wouldn’t know that word anyway, at least not as an adjective. Nonetheless, a hurt look passed across her face.

Play what you like on the radio, she offered in a grim voice, jerking the seat belt as if closing a coat against the cold.

With Louis cooking up a story about every trucker they passed, and Charlie explaining to Daron’s mom what life was like as a poor kid in a rich boarding school, something he’d never even mentioned to Daron, the two-hour drive passed pleasantly enough, and before he knew it, Candice, who read every single printed letter and punctuation mark along the highway (emphasizing the many Indian names)—a fact Daron was glad to have learned before they went on an extended road trip—yelled, Welcome to Braggsville, The City That Love Built in the Heart of Georgia, Population 712. Was there a Bragg? Candice asked.

Sure was.

Signs for the reenactment adorned every corner, each one a line drawing of a Civil War soldier superimposed over the Confederate battle flag. The signs promised THRILLING HISTORY AND HERITAGE, BREATHTAKING SCENERY AND SOUND EFFECTS, and the EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE OF A LIFETIME all at the Pride Week Patriot Days Festival. Red, white, and blue lights strung across Main Street blinked, illuminating the matching streamers wrapped around the light poles. Enormous Confederate flags dressed the watchtower—strung high enough to ensure passersby a clear view of the memorial plaques dotting each of the walls. Four men in full Confederate regalia stepped into the crosswalk, spaced like the Beatles on the Abbey Road album cover, one even barefoot. Candice fumbled over her iPhone.

Dear, don’t you ask people before taking their photograph? asked Daron’s mom as she steered the car into the parking lot of Lou Davis’s Cash-n-Carry Bait Shop and Copy Center.

Excuse me, ma’am. Candice, surprisingly chagrined, powered off her phone and slipped it into her pocket.

Lou’s? asked Daron.

They’re expanding, she explained. To Candice, she smiled. No need to apologize.

Lou’s? asked Daron.

Look at it. They’re expanding.

Lou Davis’s was designed in the style of an old general store with a faux plank face. Old Man Davis had torn down the original dovetail chink log cabin and replaced it with this cinder-block structure back in the forties. For a long time, it was the town’s central landmark. (Everything was measured by its distance from Lou’s, the watchtower, or the tree known as Miss Keen, even though that old sweet gum had long ago been debilitated by canker and had succumbed, at last, to a careening Walmart rig driven by a Mexican barely tall enough to see over the instrument panel and so when the stewing citizens arrived at the scene to find only one slight young man no taller than a three-year-old Christmas tree, they assumed that the operator had run off and took pity on the young Latino. The state trooper had called him, One lucky jumping bean. No one likes Walmart. They tolerate it because it’s cheap, but no one likes it.) When the reenactments were reinstated back in the 1950s in response to mandated integration, Lou installed the fake wood front, For the sake of authentic-nessity. (Lou used -nessity the way Gulls used Texas Pete hot sauce.) A room that doubled the size of the store was now being added to the right, jutting out into the parking lot. A handmade sign with a border of roses drawn with a highlighter promised that dine-in seating was coming soon, though obviously not in time for this year’s reenactment. Daron recognized Lee Anne’s writing and wondered if she’d be working. The exposed cinder blocks contrasted with the wooden front, reminding Daron that the store wasn’t historic, only dirty and cluttered. Inside, though, was cleaned up significantly. It was brightly lit, the new tile floor shiny, and, the biggest surprise, central air had replaced the dusty old black fan. (I love the sound of a compressor in the summer, a line the locals often intoned in the manner of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.) Rheanne Davis, Lou’s youngest granddaughter and one of Daron’s early hitches, and with whom he had shared many a milk shake for one summer in high school, sat behind the register reading People. Behind her was the updated copy center, an all-in-one inkjet printer and scanner. Back then he’d been heartbroken by her decision to take time apart, and wrote her every night for a month, though he never mailed the letters. He wasn’t that foolish. He did, however, relish this moment to introduce her to his new friends, but hoped she wouldn’t mention their previous relationship, not with those bleached bangs and the T-shirt dress.

Welcome back, Little D.

Hi, Rheanne. These are my friends from—

Hi, Little D’s friends.

He rattled off their names, but she’d already returned her attention to her magazine. No handshaking and hugging here.

At the back of the store Lou had installed a new deli counter, behind which stood his oldest granddaughter and Rheanne’s older sister, Lee Anne, who waved politely from her folding chair, positioned so that she could watch The Voice on the television in the corner.

Welcome back, Little D.

Hi, Lee Anne, these are my friends—

Hi, Little D’s friends. What are all y’allses names?

His mom rushed through the introductions. They were in a hurry, she explained as she gave her order.

Three pounds of three kinds of meat? Sliced? Lee Anne groaned. You coulda called that in, Miss Janice.

I realize that, Lee Anne, that’s why it’s an emergency order, because I wasn’t able to plan ahead, and pick up my son and his wonderful friends, who flew clear across the country to see our little festival. I had a lot to do to prepare for this trip, and now that I have an emergency, I knew I had to come here, and not up the road to that big cold box.

Of course. Lee Anne’s voice softened at the mention of the big cold box, the mart that was to remain unmentioned, but apparently appreciation wasn’t ample motivation. Lee Anne had graduated only two years before Daron, but she already moved like her grandfather Lou himself, and five minutes surely passed while she shuffled to the deli case, turned over several slabs of meat before finding the right one, peeled the plastic back, adjusted the slicer, washed her hands, and, finally ready to begin—no, not yet, it seemed—brushed aside a few stray hairs with her bare hands, made a face of intense concentration, flipped the switch on the machine, and guided the meat across. Lee Anne took a deep breath. A single slice of ham fainted across the wax paper like a Southern belle in sight of a chaise lounge. She exhaled dramatically. One!

Louis and Candice snuck a glance at each other that said, No fucking way this can be serious.

Just joking. I like to do that for the tourists.

Daron’s relief was physical.

A young girl of no more than seven came in walking on her heels and stood beside Daron’s mother. He recognized her as Irene’s daughter Ingrid.

Hello, dear. Daron’s mother raised her voice to be heard over the slicer. How are you today?

Fine, ma’am.

Doing some shopping for your mommy?

For myself, ma’am.

Lee Anne stopped slicing. The whirring blade slowed and the sound of the motor faded. Do you need something from this here counter, Ingrid? I done told you this here AC ain’t free.

Yes, ma’am, Lee Anne. Two slices of bologna and two slices of cheese.

Lee Anne glared at her, holding the stare while picking up a microphone, unnecessarily as it turned out, and yelling, We need backup at the deli counter. Rheanne slammed her People down like last week’s TV Guide and stomped to the back of the store. Candice approached the deli counter with a handmade doll in her outstretched hands. How much is this?

Rheanne shook her head and picked up the microphone, We need a price check.

Those two were still fighting like it was high school. Daron walked off in frustration, leaving Charlie chatting with his mom. He hadn’t wanted to come in here anyway. They’d made a stop for gas as well, which really irked him. Why couldn’t his mom have done all this before picking them up? She knew how far away the airport was. But she didn’t plan and they had ended up in a gas station with Candice and Louis gasping and pulling out their phones to snap photos of little jigaboo dolls and bumper stickers with slogans like ARIZONA: DOING THE JOB THE FEDS WON’T DO … BLIND JUSTICE IS EQUAL / SOCIAL JUSTICE IS RACIST … GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, DANGEROUS MINORITIES DO … I DON’T LIKE HIS WHITE HALF EITHER … IF YOU’RE ANY ’CAN, EXCEPT AMERI-CAN—GO HOME … IF I’D KNOWN IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS, I WOULD HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON. By tomorrow this time, the slogans would be all over Facebook and Instagram. Worse yet, Louis might method tweet, which was his form of method acting. He certainly had enough inspiration.

When Lou rearranged the store, he’d tucked away the bumper stickers in the back corner, but after the last stop, Candice knew what to look for. AMERICAN BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD announced the one Louis and Candice were reading aloud, working over the words like kids sounding out the list of puzzling ingredients on the side panel of their favorite sugary cereal.

Rheanne was on the phone now. Was she staring at them? He couldn’t tell, but suspected it. She must have been because for just a moment her eyes met his, and they both quickly looked away.

Louis and Candice read the rest of the stickers, each of which bore the Confederate flag and a slogan: THESE COLORS DON’T RUN … HUNTING IS THE BEST ANGER MANAGEMENT … THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN … KEEP HONKING—I’M RELOADING. Lou’s selection, fortunately, was not as obnoxious as the gas station’s. Daron had never thought much about them, his attention from a young age drawn to the sign over the register: YOU WANT CREDIT, COME BACK TOMORROW.

What’s tomorrow? asked Candice when they were checking out.

The reenactment. Rheanne blinked once, slowly, as if in disbelief, as if the question were an affront.

You get credit for the reenactment?

That’s only if you come tomorrow.

Wednesdays?

On Wednesday, tomorrow will be Thursday.

Oh. That’s funny. She gave a frenzied, feverish laugh, so unrestrained that Daron worried she was mocking Rheanne, but Rheanne joined in, too. Candice picked up a pamphlet entitled History of Braggsville. How much is this? Rheanne shrugged and picked up the microphone, We need a price check.

Lou’s was a few blocks from the edge of town, and from there it was barely a ten-minute drive to Daron’s house. The rest of the way home, it seemed that everyone was on their front porch. If they didn’t have a porch, they were in the window. Daron called out their names and waved as they passed. There was Mary Jo, Bobby, Kevin, Dennis, Raymond, Lucille, Frankie, Coddles, Lyle, John, Andy, Miss Ursula, Jim, Lonnie, Postmaster Jones, William, Travis, Todd, Tony, Dennis M … They all waved back.

Will there be a quiz? You know, it’s hella creepy, all those waving bingo wings, Louis slapped his triceps.

We drive everywhere here. It’s too hot for old people to walk. Daron went back to listing names, hoping to distract them from The Charlies—a legion theyselves—guarding driveways, gracing lawns, standing sentinel on porches with wide-eyed accusation. Not to mention the Hobarts, who were shoe-footing it in the single lane ahead of them with I DON’T LIKE HIS WHITE HALF EITHER pasted dead center below their license plate.

Candice leaned over and whispered to Daron, Where do all the black people live?

In the front yards. Louis pointed randomly.

Charlie laughed, followed by Daron’s mom.

Daron slapped Louis’s hand. No, in the Gully.

The gutter!

No, the Gully, the Gully, repeated Daron, flushed from Candice’s whisper, her arm against his, her strawberry breath at his ear. Their neighborhood is called the Gully. It’s right behind my house, on the other side of the hill, on the other side of the Holler, then walk a little ways. My nana—grandma—nearly got lost back there and she was from the woods.

Can we walk there?

I don’t exactly know how to get there on foot.

Isn’t it behind your house?

Sort of. I know how to get there. It’s just you don’t walk it. After you cross the hill, the Gully is still behind the Holler, but no one actually walks through the Holler. To get to the Gully, you drive back to the highway and around.

She made her life-is-unfair face, angry and sad all at once, like a child who had paid her quarter but received no bubble gum ball from the globe, a look he hated because it made him feel protective but powerless and swelled a sudden urge to cup her breasts. He tried explaining that the Gully wasn’t worse off or hidden. They had it good for work because they were actually closer to the mill, and upwind. They had their own houses and their own store and their own mechanic. It was just that no one walked through the Holler. Nobody. You didn’t have to be Methuselah to know that.

Chapter Ten

His mom’s backyard rivaled Berkeley’s best. The entire plot was five acres, as were most along their road, but his father was one of the few who’d cordoned off a portion of his land, erecting a solid six-foot wood dog-ear fence behind the house to create a sizable yard, almost the dimensions of a basketball court, in which over the years his mother had planted a small herb garden, ivy to dress the gazebo, a flower bed along the house, and several rows of dwarf pear trees. She planned well. When all the planting was finally finished, bounded on each side by colorful flowers or edible fruit was a neatly cropped, lush lawn in the center of which the gazebo sat like a paperweight.

When they entered the backyard, his mom gesturing as though announcing dignitaries to the royal court, a cheer sounded across the crowd. Daron cringed when he heard Jungle Boogie playing. His family was dangerously drunk when they started playing soul, and it was only eight P.M. Almost thirty people danced, sang, chatted, smoked, or swapped stories in various corners of the yard, all waiting to ambush him with embarrassment. His fifty-seven-year-old aunt Boo would soon be dropping it like it was hot, his uncle Lance would soon be doing the funky chicken clogging routine, and his seven-year-old cousin Ashley would soon be doing her Beyoncé Single Ladies impersonation, complete with a body suit, stockings, and high heels.

Then there were his older female cousins—the stripper, the trucker, and the elementary school teacher—referred to as no-count because they’d never married. The stripper and teacher were twins, and rumor had it they occasionally played switcheroo. At most gatherings, one started a fire and the other a fight. But there was no telling who because they switched roles for each party.

Of course there was Uncle Roy, who resembled Don Knotts and chanted nigger like it would cure his pancreatic cancer. His wife, Aunt Chester, never knew where to put the needle down in the conversation and couldn’t meet people without making fun of their names, if she liked them. Daron couldn’t blame her. Her Christian name was Anna, but Uncle Roy always introduced her as his wife, Chester, and often added, nodding at her bosom, You’ll never guess how she got that nickname or why I married her. Quint, more a brother than a cousin, had the Confederate flag tattooed on his left forearm, in case you didn’t see the one on his right, Balance, his only explanation.

Daron led his friends around the yard, introducing them to everybody more for his own benefit than for theirs, wondering what he would do and whom he would talk to when the niceties were over. Since college started, these get-togethers felt more stressful. His young cousin’s dancing was evidence of the media’s deleterious influence on her definition of beauty and her self-image. (He had written a paper proudly entitled The Story of Oh: Hypersexualization and Young Girls, and e-mailed it to one cousin, who e-mailed it to another cousin, who e-mailed it to another, who posted it on Facebook with a request for help interpreting the, Journalism of my little cousin who I always knew was going to be a genius. Another cousin had it bound and shelved.) She would never look like Beyoncé; even most black women didn’t look like Beyoncé. Though when young he had admired their sarcasm and sharp wit, his older female cousins—the misanthrope, the pyromaniac, and the exhibitionist—all obviously hated their lives, lives that would never recover the hope of their youth, lives now defined by their status as old maids, though barely thirty. They were stuck here, and the finality of that sentence pained him. It was impossible to have a conversation with one of them and not feel like he was addressing a ghost. He should have warned his friends it would be BYOC—Bring Your Own Conversation.

Yet, every few encounters one of the Indians fell happy captive. Charlie was the first to go. Uncle Roy asked if he had folks ’round the way in the Gully. When Charlie shook his head, No, Roy offered to tell him about it. A few minutes later, the crazy cousins, avoiding Daron’s eyes, sheepishly asked Candice about medical marijuana, and the four of them huddled like old friends under the umbrella his mother had borrowed from Lou’s for the occasion.

And Quint waited at the end of the circuit the entire time, grinning, stroking his thin chin, sharp elbow propped, pinned to a stumpy forearm thick as a pig’s knee; he’d recently spent another thirty days on chopping down a tree to steal a bike. (He blew time like he had it to spare, like it grew on clocks instead of died there.) His favorite top, when he wore one, was any T-shirt with writing because, It’s like you can say something without saying anything. Today’s slogan: I MAKE IT LOOK EASY.

Quint hugged Daron so tightly pain passed immediately into nostalgia. Six years older, Quint was forever bigger and stronger, and always squeezing or thumping or noodling Daron, as he did now, slipping Daron into an arm-bar and a full nelson and then a headlock to give him a noogie. Their entangled limbs did not resemble those of wrestlers at work so much as modern dancers in choreographed chaos. Daron had long since stopped resisting and accepted that Quint had to thump his chest at least once in front of all new folks. There were two types of people, as Daron learned in Anthro 101: tree climbers and tree pissers. His older, stronger, and quicker cousin Quint, unfortunately, was of the latter variety. (And no Twitter rants would suffice; Q was analog as a motherfucker.) On the other hand, at least he was a cousin. Threat of Quint was enough to limit the high school bullying to name-calling (Donut Black Hole beat big black eye). No one wanted Quint on their back, the very position in which Daron now found himself.

Louis raised his hands in surrender. I’d help, but I’d only end up in the same position as you.

Don’t worry ’bout him none. Quint tightened his grip. Ya’tta know by now. Oysters up under pressure, but he’ll come back later and deliver a pearl. Quint plucked him on the head one last time before releasing him, Won’t ya?

Daron stretched his neck, rotated his head in one direction, then the other. Quint, this is Louis, my roommate. Louis, Quint, first cousin.

Loose Chang. Louis extended his hand. Friends call me Loose.

He never told me you was so cute. Y’all live together?

Not by choice, not by choice. After a moment of silence, Louis added, For one thing he’s messy.

Just fuckin’ with ya. You eat? He pointed to the folding table against the house where the awning would protect the food from the sun. That there is the best potato salad, cold cut dip, and cobbler you’re going to find.

Cold cut dip, repeated Louis haltingly.

Quint wrapped a massive arm around Louis’s neck and steered him away, winking over his shoulder at Daron, who wondered if he was supposed to know what that meant.

Smoke wafted over to him and his mouth watered, even though he hadn’t eaten meat for five years. Berkeley and its gas grills, expensive gas grills, expensive shiny stainless steel gas grills, with casters and more attachments than Inspector Gadget and price tags that made him gag, yielded a result no better than poking a coat hanger through a hot dog and holding it over the range, as he did when a kid. Fire isn’t flavor, but the Big Green Egg, that ingenious ceramic capsule of goodness, that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of cookout equipment, both grill and smoker—God bless!—was guaranteed to give even the veggie burgers and tofu dogs a cheek-smacking hickory finish, except there weren’t any veggie burgers in the coolers, nor were any in the backyard refrigerator.

He found his mother in the kitchen, which betrayed no evidence she was hosting a party for more than thirty two-fisted, high-livered Davenports, McCormicks, and their miscellaneous miscellanies. It was a spotless white room, surgically so, the only color coming from the piglets. Pink piglets on dish towels, placemats, plaques: all from Daron and his father, her little piglets. She was leaning over the sink, scraping a nonstick baking sheet with a red rubber spatula. When he asked her about the vegetarian items, she stood, groaned and slapped the sink. I knew I forgot something.

It was typical that she was so busy cleaning she’d forgotten the most important items. She couldn’t forget meat because there was always a year’s supply in the freezer. Shit, Mom, that was the most important thing, Daron’s voice went high.

Is something the matter?

Everything’s the matter. You know they have dietary restrictions. Candice and Charlie don’t eat red meat. If you weren’t being all extra nice and going out of your way like, you know, to be like, all, you know …

Saccharine?

Yeah, saccharine.

I was going to wait until later, but since you’re bringing this up now. I assume you mean artificial. I am not artificial, and I’m right appalled and embarrassed that you would say that about me, and suggest it in front of your friends.

I’m embarrassed that you flirted with Charlie.

She slapped him on the cheek with the spatula. You know better. Don’t get highfalutin in front of folk. You told me you were bringing home friends, and gave me specific instructions that made me think … Never mind. One day when I’m not here, you’ll appreciate me.

Daron walked out, stomping down the hallway to the foyer, where he stopped short of slamming the front door because his father was across the yard, leaving the garage and walking toward the backyard. Daron waited in the doorway until he disappeared, not wanting his father to tear into him about the temporary tattoo on his cheek, as he would call it, before lecturing him on respecting his mother.

Ruts ran from the small squares of dead lawn on either side of the driveway entrance to the detached garage. His father had remembered to put away The Charlies. They were passed down from his grandfather, Old Hitch, who counted them creepier than bankers, he said, with those watermelon-red lips, but who kept them because his father had given them to him. Daron’s own father had the same complaint, and had promised to put them up when Old Hitch passed, but after the funeral, when the first thing Daron thought to do was move them, because from his bedroom window he could see them leering at night, wild-eyed, his father took to Daron’s neck with a shuddering reminder that, This is my house. I make the rules about who goes where, when, why, and how.

Laughter erupted from the backyard while Daron was toeing one of the squares of dead grass where The Charlies had stood, and he looked up to see his mother kicking the other. He had not heard her come out.

Those were heavy. She flexed her arms.

That explained the ruts. Daron muttered his thanks.

Does our deal still stand, D’aron?

Yes’m.

Don’t Yes’m me. Does our deal still stand?

Yeah, Mom, it does.

Okay. She pinched his cheek and it burned even more than the slap. He flinched. Trying to disfigure me?

They laughed. She kissed him.

You don’t really think I forgot about your girlfriend, did you?

She’s not exactly my girlfriend, and she does eat meat, just not beef.

Oh. Well. Anyway, what I was going to say was I forgot to take those veggie thingamabobs out of the freezer. And who knows, after she gets to see you in your home environment that might change. Hmmm?

Daron tore the blade of grass he was holding.

His mother chucked his chin. I love you, hon.

Me too.

She went, as she always did, Thank you, honey. You know that’s my favorite band.

WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE BACKYARD, Quint and Louis were sitting on the red beer cooler, thumb wrestling, Candice and his stripper cousin—at least he thought it was her—were in the gazebo in deep conversation, and Charlie was talking to Daron’s father. The Davenports were big men and women. Two generations in the mill. Before that, three generations of farming, his father liked to say, Yeoman. Yo-man! His uncles would kite their arms like they were steering a bullwhip and declare, We’re the original Georgia Crackers. But next to Charlie, his father looked puny. He never thought of Charlie as large until he saw him next to other people, or recognized the look of closeted alarm some people wore as they tried to avoid being next to him. In The City, rarely did anyone sit beside him on the subway, even during rush hour. At night, women clutched purses, crossed streets; guys steered wide. Charlie would occasionally whistle Vivaldi to reassure bystanders because, No one expects to be mugged by a dude who knows classical music. More than once he claimed he enjoyed the extra space. Daron never believed that. Today, no one behaved like that. But then again, they knew if anyone was going to gladly handle their possessions, it would be Quint. His father waved him over.

D’aron, is there something you want to say?

Daron stuttered, giving Charlie a quizzical look.

Tell me again what D’aron told you about us, Charlie.

Charlie looked confused.

His father laughed. I’m just teasing you. I wouldn’t want to know what you said, especially if you didn’t say anything. I thought my mom was old-fashioned for scaring us off the radio, D’aron thinks we’re old-fashioned, and your kids—he rested a hand on Charlie’s shoulder—will think you’re old-fashioned.

Just a cycle, sir.

That’s right, sir.

They went back to talking about the playoffs, and Daron quickly excused himself. The smoke rising from the Green Egg swayed lazy in the wind, the bright coolers were lined up beside the house like Legos. Candice was now moving through the crowd, snapping pictures of everybody. Daron would have to ask her about that later. He didn’t want his family to be featured in the final project, the object of academic scrutiny, their every cough subject to diagnosis by his professor and classmates. But he couldn’t say, No, no he couldn’t, not while she was hugging up next to his uncle and aunt, teetering, extending her arm before her to capture what she called her Paparazzi shot. Last year she’d cut her hair short a few days after they first met. He remembered because the week after the dot party, she waved him over to her bench on Lower Sproul Plaza and he felt a momentary thrill at being hailed by an unknown female. With the cropped hair, she looked tomboyish, which he liked. In profile tonight, with her dreadlocks pulled back, he saw that again, the slight nose, the prominent forehead, and the smile, always a smile like she knew you. Over the sound of the breakers at César Chávez Park, she’d once admitted that her family wasn’t close; that her father expressed a greater affinity for moths and fruit liqueurs and her mother a keen interest in civil rights. She dubbed them emotionally abusive. Taking it to mean that she wasn’t as spoiled as she would have preferred, Daron had laughed so hard he hadn’t even seen her walk off, vanish into the grassy hill, footsteps light as a squirrel. But as she shared more about her parents, he wasn’t so sure, and now prided himself on the fact that in his family, no one had ever been interested in anything other than someone else’s business. Candice remained between Roy and Chester for several minutes, showing them photos, or who knew what else, on her phone. With Aunt Chester gasping in amazement and Uncle Roy squinting with disbelief and Candice grinning proudly, they looked like a family. Daron took a picture. He had anticipated protecting his friends, running interference, but everything was going smoothly. Even Quint and Louis were still getting along. They stood at the table, deep in conversation, eating directly off the serving dishes, Louis gnawing a rib and Quint a piece of chicken, both ignoring Daron when he walked up.

Louis’s fingers and face oozed, gooey as those of a zombie at a fresh coffin trough. He sucked the knuckle of one hand so hard it looked like he might take the skin off. This is the shit! Someone put their foot in the sauce.

Oh. Is that a—Chinese—saying, too? asked Quint.

Simple math. Everything Chinese saying, if you add accent and subtract words. You put foot in sauce!

Quint guffawed, spraying flecks of chicken across the table. Daron made a mental note of the dishes seasoned thusly.

You oughta be a comedian. Chinese people are funny and all, but you got some jokes.

Louis beamed like he’d found a buttered Olsen twin in his bed. Quint kept talking, all the while pouring a shot from a bottle of Jack, which he handed to Louis while taking an impressive draw himself, enough to bob his apple a few times. Louis continued bobbleheading. About ten minutes later Quint called for everyone’s attention.

Hey, hey! he yelled, tapping a fork against a beer bottle. Before they all could hush up, Quint escalated to bottle-on-bottle action, head-butting two fallen soldiers, which he did until one broke, at which point everyone fell silent and looked at Janice, who stood in the kitchen doorway, one hand holding open the screen door, the red spatula at her side.

What the heck are you doing, Quintillion Lee Jackson?

I’m gettin’ y’allses attention. The stony grit in his voice ground down a measure, he continued, I see you’re armed, so I sure ain’t aiming to get on your short side, Aunty J. They all laughed. No, ma’am, not when you standing there looking knotted like Sheriff when he come ’round to see me the odd Friday. Used to be he came only after something went wrong. Now he rolls by every couple weeks, asks me if I got anything to confess. I always say, No. Quint winked. But y’all knows I always do. More laughter. I’m just the opener. Just the opener, not the beer, so sit back. We’re fixing to have a show. It’s the first performance in the South of the famous California comic Lenny Bruce Lee! Clap, y’all! Let’s hear it. Make him welcome, dammit.

Quint set a white plastic chair in front of the food table. Louis sat down and Quint grabbed his arm. After a moment of drunken pantomime, Louis understood and stood on the chair, at which point Daron’s family applauded as if a trick had been performed.

Louis cleared his throat and appeared to be reciting something to himself. Okay, let’s get started.

Hello, Braggsville! You don’t know me. I’m Chinese, but I had a typical American upbringing. I was also beaten by the Vietnamese. At that, a few people shared sympathetic chuckles. Only Charlie and Candice laughed heartily. Daron was disappointed. Louis was Malaysian, and claimed to be Chinese only when it was the easiest explanation. As he put it, It’s like saying you live in Unit 2 at Berkeley. No one knows that, so you go, San Fran, and people go, Oh.

I have the same relationship problems. Sometimes my girlfriend is like, Why don’t we go dancing? I’m thinking this is like if I opened the fridge and the steaks were like, Why don’t we go hunting? They liked that one. Louis stood a little straighter. The chair wobbled. Did he glance at Candice when he mentioned girlfriend? Daron hoped not.

See, this points to the differences between the sexes. I asked her, Seriously, do you think men really like to dance? If we could pay admission, give a chick the same amount of cash it would take to buy ten drinks, and take her home, we would. But that would be a brothel, or a sorority house.

When the crowd responded less than enthusiastically, Louis explained, See, we have this thing in some colleges known as sorostitution. It means rich girls … never mind. So then, my girl is like, But dancing is how you tell who’s good in bed. Maybe so, I told her, but that’s another difference between the sexes. You think we care about that.

She was like, All men care about is sex.

I was like, Yeah, that’s true, but not whether you’re good at it.

They liked that one. Uncle Roy pointed to Aunt Chester, who smacked his hand away.

Okay. My friend Charlie is here. Let’s hear it for Charlie. Chinese people and black people have a lot in common. Charlie clapped politely.

The Wu-Tang Clan. Quint spit out his drink laughing.

Tiger Woods? The black part was cheating, and the Chinese part was driving when he hit the tree. Charlie shook his head regretfully.

We each give our children funny names. There was silence, until he added, That white people can’t pronounce. It’s a conspiracy.

White people can’t cook our food, but they love to eat it. Though someone here makes good-ass ribs. He hiccuped. Excuse me. Good ribs. That was my black joke. I gotta represent. He gave Charlie a thumbs-up.

Oh yeah. Chinese people got some things in common with Southerners, too. You ready for this, Braggsville? I was at this store—he pointed over his shoulder, Lou’s Bait and Cash and Copy.

A few people in the crowd pointed in the other direction.

It’s in the other direction!

It’s called Lou Davis’s Cash-n-Carry Bait Shop and Copy Center!

Yeah! the stripper yelled.

The crowd all gestured toward town until Louis, too, was pointing in the right direction.

Yeah, so Chinese people are big into directions, too. He paused, collecting himself. But, I was at this store, Lou Davis’s, and it was like a Chinese store, you had everything: meat, bumper stickers, everything. In Chinatown, it’s like that. You can buy fruit and bread and get your teeth pulled in the back. Anyway, at Lou Davis’s I saw some strange stuff, like headcheese and all, and thought, hmmm, headcheese. Maybe these people are weird. Then I had an image of my grandma eating, guess what, chicken feet!

I thought, Okay, Southerners are like Chinese. We have pig’s feet and ears, and even the ovaries. A collective groan issued forth. Louis raised his hands. I don’t write the news. I just deliver the paper. Whole point is if we even got the ovaries, you know we don’t waste nothing. We eat everything but the oink or, sometimes in our case, the bark.

A hush fell over the crowd. That’s a joke, you all, Louis added, and the crowd went into an uproar, clapping and stomping their feet.

Louis paused, savoring the moment. He was much better than Daron expected.

Louis began speaking, but in the corner, Uncle Roy whispered in Aunt Chester’s ear, a mite too loudly, I think he mean they eat dogs. See! and the crowd went wild again.

Daron’s father was red in the face, as was his mother, who clapped both hands over her mouth as she often did when laughing against her will. His cousins held their sides as if in pain, and tears streamed down Quint’s face. After the crowd finally settled down, Louis continued.

And vegetarians? Who would willingly give up meat? I saw a menu in Cali with vegetarian beef stew. That’s going too far. If it’s vegetarian, why does it need a meat name? It just can’t be good. It’s got to be like sexing a blow-up doll. It’ll do the trick for a minute, but you won’t feel good about it afterwards, and you keep it to yourself, and you hide it when company comes over. He bowed to thunderous applause.

For the rest of the night, Louis was the star. Daron had wanted to invite Jo-Jo but knew he wouldn’t fit in. The last time he’d seen Jo-Jo was over winter break. They’d spent the afternoon on the hill above Old Man Donner’s land drinking Old Grand-Dad, sitting Indian-style on a ledge of rock that gun-sighted dead right over downtown, a meager allotment of buildings cupped in a gentle swale, Main Street stitching through like a scar. Once more, Jo-Jo had called him early, asked him to take a ride. Once more, they had ridden in silence.

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