Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1“You’re in a lot of activities.”

By the time I got into high school five years later, I’d joined the Academic Olympics team, chorus, band—first-chair trombone since fifth grade—drama club, and also the Dover Sharks soccer, basketball, and track teams. I also played Little League baseball in town. We’d gone two years undefeated, thanks in no small part to my pitching.

My mother sat me down at the kitchen table for a serious conversation during ninth-grade finals week. Mama never wore any jewelry, not even a wedding ring. I noticed that for the first time then, because I was looking at her hands, just like she was. The way she kept wringing and opening and closing them, it was hard to look anywhere else. I got the feeling, as the conversation went on, it was difficult for her to look me in the eye too.

“Some of the things you do are expensive. They take up a lot of time, and though it hurts me to ask you to choose, I think next year we are going to have to cut back.”

I believed her when she said it hurt. I just kind of didn’t care.

Dropped off safe-haven/baby-Moses style at the local firehouse a few months into my existence, I’d been fostered by an older white couple for a while, then eventually adopted by Angela and Marvet Watson—Mama and Dad. Our family was like a reverse Diff’rent Strokes—a short, precocious, somewhat Caucasian-looking little stinker being raised by a black family. The other disparity was our financial situation. Nowhere near as wealthy as the Drummonds, my parents both worked yet still probably had a bank balance lower than Mrs. Garrett’s. As for my biological makeup, well, I could have been black for all any of us knew. Despite the fact I sometimes felt as white as Mrs. Smeckler’s dry-erase board from back in the day, most people probably saw something else when noticing the color of my skin.

One time, Jeff Ackerman asked, “What are you supposed to be?” Since it wasn’t Halloween, and since we were in the middle of the chapter in our seventh-grade history books about nationalities and heritage, I figured he was asking about that. My coloring was definitely up for debate, even within my own family. I had coarse and kinky hair, good rhythm, and I could jump. My father had pointed all that out to me more than once. “I’m pretty sure you’re at least half-black,” he often said. When I repeated those stereotypes and Dad’s conclusion to Jeff, he called me racist. I thought that was ignorant. I figured my father would as well. “Did it hurt you when I said it?” Dad asked me. “The thing about being able to dance and play ball?”

“No.”

“Not a twinge of discomfort, not a jolt in your chest or a knot in your gut?”

“No.” I was being completely truthful.

“Would the same words…the same hackneyed labels hurt from someone else…from this Jeff kid, maybe?”

I had to think about that. “I’m not sure.”

“How come?”

“Well…I figured it was kind of a joke with you. It’s also the God’s honest truth. I got moves on the dance floor and the court.”

“Do you now?” My father smiled.

“Yeah, no matter what race I am. If Jeff said it…” I thought some more. “I guess racism is more about how a person acts towards someone overall—on a daily basis—than it is about a possibly inappropriate sentence or two.” I also had a pretty good vocabulary for my age. “Right? More about…”

My dad offered a word that wouldn’t come to my mind. “Intent?”

“Yeah. That.”

“So you know the definition?”

“Yes.”

Dad kept staring at me, wanting proof.

“It means why they say what they say.”

“Or why you do.”

“Me?”

“What you say as a joke could rub someone the wrong way just as easily…about race, about a boy’s mannerisms being girly, about a girl being butch because her fastball’s faster than yours…”

My father wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He was teaching me a lesson regarding past transgressions I didn’t even realize he’d known about. I huffed. “Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

Dad smiled again. “That’s what a lot of people ask. Sometimes it’s all pretty subtle.” He ruffled my tight dark curls. “If you don’t know prejudice when you hear it, trust your gut to know when you feel it. As long as you’re aware of the intentions behind your own words and act accordingly from now on…as long as you can defend what you say, apologize when you can’t, and even when the best of intentions go awry, because that will happen too…I think you’ll be okay.”

My father never talked down to me. That was probably why I was as smart as I was. He always encouraged me too, and that was why I never shied away from trying new things. I’d always figured I was lucky to excel at so many of them. Yeah. Money was sometimes tight, but my parents had always handed it over without comment when it came to school. Therefore, I figured education was a priority. Now that things had changed, I chose to blame my sister, Beth. She was pretty nasty to me lately. My neighborhood bud, Cal, said it was because pregnant women were grouchy. Beth’s boyfriend, Julius, had been coming around a few years. I caught them kissing all the time, often with his hand on her butt.

“Gross!” I hadn’t really meant to give myself away—to let them know I’d been snooping—but the declaration had come quite loudly.

“You won’t think so someday,” Julius had told me.

“Yuck. I’m never kissing a girl!” It was a vow—even barely on the precipice of puberty, yet already quite enthralled at the way Julius’s tight jeans hugged the curves of his ass—I was pretty sure I’d never break.

Beth wasn’t moving out. She wasn’t marrying Julius, yet he was at our house all the time. Food for him, food for the baby coming in July, that was why I couldn’t be in any more school activities.

“Okay. If that’s how it has to be…” I hoisted myself up from the wooden kitchen chair with my palms on the table, pretending I was frail with overwhelming dismay. “I’ll think it over. It might take a day or two to decide which things it will hurt the least to quit.” I stopped in the doorway, my shoulders slumped, my voice shaky. “Just a little over two years away from filling out college applications, I was fixin’ to sign up for more things next fall, and even more as a junior and a senior, not dropping out of all but one.” I tossed the last spade full of guilt. “Unless I can’t even go to college. If that’s how it’s going down, who the hell even cares?”

I’d made my mother too sad to yell at me for cursing. I felt good about that as I slammed the bedroom door to make her feel worse.

“You’re gonna break it.”

“Shut up, Devon.” I barely got the three words out without crying, not so much because I was being forced to quit stuff, more due to the image in my mind of how I’d left my mother in the other room.

“We don’t say ‘shut up’ in this house,” he reminded me.

“Who are you, Mrs. Smeckler?”

“No. I’m Devon.” I shared a room with my baby brother, ten by the time I’d turned fifteen. He was slow, at least according to the school system. I would tend to disagree.

As I looked at all my gold medals from the Scholastic Olympics championships, and the ones from All-State Band, the playbills from all of my shows, my name often listed first as the lead, I wondered what I would do to make my parents proud of me if I couldn’t participate in extracurricular activities in senior high. I thought the first thing I might try was acting more mature—not right that minute, but definitely soon.

A few days later, Mama and I were back on speaking terms after I told her I was sorry. I still had no idea which one of my many interests to follow, but I had a couple months to decide, since we were just starting summer vacation.

“Come on!” My sister, Beth, yelled, interrupting my first official no-school nap only an hour after I’d first gotten up for the day.

“Come on where?” I hollered back.

“We’re fixin’ to go to the pool.”

“Fixin’…” It was one of those words we Watsons used a lot. Though we lived in New York, our parents had both grown up in the south. When they moved north for work, they brought some of the vernacular with them.

“What pool?” And why did she sound so pissed, as if she’d called me fourteen times when I was pretty sure it had only been once?

“They’re opening the pool today, idiot.”

Oh yeah—the pregnancy.

She appeared in my doorway, blocking the sunlight from the hallway window. “Hurry your ugly ass up!”

“What pool?” I asked again, despite her mood.

Julius stood behind her in trunks and no shirt. His skin was flawless, and his chest muscles were well-developed and tight. When I got to the hallway, Devon was out there too, in the same state of half-dress. Apparently they both knew what pool. Unlike Julius’s, Devon’s boyish dark-toned belly stuck out as round as our sister’s.

“Duh.” When Beth shook her head, her giant boobs shook too. “The town pool…the one they finally put in.”

“No kidding. We got a pool?” I didn’t keep up on local news very well.

“How can you not…?” She shook her head again. “We’re leaving. Come now or stay home.”

“Can pregnant women even swim?”

I got a whack upside the head for that one, even though, as it turned out, Beth had no intention of doing so.

* * * *

“The pool is in there.” She and Julius selected a pair of chaises outside, so far from any water there was absolutely no danger of the tiny bathing suit, holding back a whole lot of t**s and tummy, coming in contact with even a drop.

“You’re not coming in?” I asked.

“Nope.” Her plan all along had been to dump us off on another babysitter.

“Black people don’t swim,” Julius added.

That was a pity, right there, because I knew for a fact Julius looked damned fine wet.

“I’m going to,” Devon said.

“Me too,” I proudly declared, forgetting, as I often did, that Julius’s stereotypical, in-jest proclamation might not really apply to me.

“Watch him,” Beth ordered.

“I will,” I told her. “Stay where a lifeguard can see you, Dev.” I figure that covered it.

The front and back walls of the structure surrounding the pool were more like a partition, currently open all the way. The side walls, however, were stationary, with tiny louver windows up high that did very little to move the sultry air around. Basically, unless one was in the water, it was hot as f**k. So, that’s where I stayed—and I loved it!

Tiring of kiddie splashing after about ten minutes, I left Devon in the capable hands of a pool attendant handling a group of younger kids and wandered over to where some old guy with sculpted abs but gray chest hair was teaching teens about technique. Though I’d never swum before, I was a natural. Mr. Washboard Stomach said so, and I wasn’t surprised. I’d yet to find anything I wasn’t good at, and had the certificates and medals to prove it.

Almost immediately, swimming felt like something I could do for the rest of my life. Maybe it was that charge I always felt, that whole eel thing. I was part white, part black, part sea creature. I could believe that. No problem. There was something else about the water, though—how it touched me everywhere. Wind, the bitter coldness of it or its sultry warmth in summer, could be blocked by clothing, hair, or by putting a hand up against it. Sunlight was easy to shield and keep away from one’s flesh. Water, it had its way with me. It got between my fingers when I put them to my ears and eyes. It worked freely through and up inside my swim trunks, invading and teasing places on my adolescent body I was only beginning to think about wanting to be touched. There was a sound under there too, sort of like a hum or maybe more like a constant audible vibration, like when my dad forgot to turn the old stereo off at Grampa’s after he was finished playing records from decades ago. Between that and the uninhibited nature of its caress, the water in that pool felt like my first illicit teenage lover.