they had either been told of its history and meaning, had been called it before, or had seen or heard a loved one called it before, none of which options were a lot better than the others.
Even as the school system we shared was every day treating Bobby and Vince as that thing they now called me—disciplining them more harshly or placing them in remedial level groups no matter their abilities—on the playground they could turn it around and claim for themselves the power to define reality, my reality, and thereby gain a brief respite from what was happening in class. Yet the joke was on them in the end. Because once recess was over, and the ball was back in the hands of the teachers, there were none prepared to make me the nigger.
It had been white privilege and black oppression that had made the joke funny in the first place, or even decipherable; and it would likewise be white privilege and black oppression that would make it irrelevant and even a bit pathetic. But folks take their victories where they can find them. And some of us find them more often than others.
I WAS NEVER a very good student. No matter my reading level or general ability, I had a hard time applying myself to subject matter that I didn’t find interesting. In effect, I treated school like a set of noisecanceling headphones, letting in the sounds I was interested in hearing while shutting out the rest. By middle school I was struggling academically, finding myself bored and looking desperately for something else to occupy my time. Given the home in which I lived, it was hardly surprising that I would settle on theatre. Growing up in a home where my father was always on stage, even when he wasn’t, had provided me with a keen sense of timing, of delivery, of what was funny and what wasn’t, of how to move onstage, of how to “do nothing well,” as Lorelle Reeves, my theatre teacher in high school, would put it.
I grew up memorizing lines to plays I would never perform, simply because my dad had saved all the scripts from shows he had done in the past. They were crammed into a small, brown-lacquered paperback book cabinet that hung in the living room of our apartment—one after another, with tattered and dog-eared pages, compliments of Samuel French, the company that owned distribution rights for most of the stage play scripts in the United States. I would pick them up and read them out loud in my room, creating different voices for different characters. The plays dealt with adult themes, many of which I didn’t understand, but which I pretended to, just in case anyone ever needed a ten-year-old to play the part of Paul Bratter in Barefoot in the Park.
At Stokes School, in fifth grade, I would finally have the chance to take a theatre class as an elective. The teacher, Susan Moore, was among the most eccentric persons I’ve ever met. Had I been older, I may well have appreciated her eccentricity; but at the age of ten, eccentric is just another word for weird, and weird is how we students viewed her. All we knew was that she was an odd, fat lady (we weren’t too sensitive on issues of body type, as I’m sure won’t surprise you) with a dozen cats, whose clothes always smelled like cat litter and whose car smelled worse. One of my friends, Bobby Bell, who was not in the drama club but once got a ride from Ms. Moore, dubbed her wheels the “douche ’n’ push,” which we all thought was hilarious, even though I doubt any of us really knew what a douche was. In fact, once I learned the meaning of the word, calling her car a douche ’n’ push seemed less funny than gross.
We didn’t study much in terms of theatre technique. For good or bad, Susan thought it best to just throw us into the process of doing theatre, learning as we went. So she would pick a play and we would work on it for the better part of a year: reading it, learning it, and then finally producing and performing it. The good thing about this process was that it led to fairly sophisticated outcomes, at least for fifth and sixth graders. When you have ten- and eleven-year-olds pulling off Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and never dropping a line, you know you’re doing something special. As the male lead in that production, I can attest to feeling significantly older and wiser than my years for having done it, for having successfully taken on a Shakespearian farce at such an age.
On the downside, unless you got one of the coveted roles in the play chosen for that year by Ms. Moore, your participation in the theatre group would be circumscribed. Occasionally, she would create a few characters and script a few lines for them, so that as many kids as possible could get a chance to be onstage, but this hardly flattened the hierarchy of the club. There were the actors and there was everyone else: the students who would work the lights, pull the curtains, or just hang out and perhaps help the actors run lines, or maybe just quit theatre altogether and find something else to do.
Having an actor for a father pretty well assured me of a prominent role in whatever production was chosen as our annual play. Ms. Moore could presume my talent, and although that talent may have been genuine, there were certainly no cold readings or auditions. A few of us would pretty much rotate: I would be the male lead in one play, and in the next production that honor would go to Albert. The female leads would also pretty much rotate between two of the girls in our class, Stacey Wright and Shannon Holladay. It was a fairly closed circle.
In sixth grade we would switch from Shakespeare to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which, given that it’s a musical and neither Albert nor I could sing, should have guaranteed that it would be our turn to pull curtains or some such thing. But despite our lack of ability, we were cast as Charlie and Linus, respectively. In my case, Ms. Moore actually agreed to take the song “My Blanket and Me” out of the play altogether, because I made clear that I was terrified to sing a solo in public.
My ability to force script changes was not about race of course, but my ability to be in the position I was, and therefore to make that kind of demand and gain the director’s acquiescence, most assuredly was about race, at least in part. Had I been anything but white, it would have been highly unlikely that I would have gotten the parts I landed in any of the productions done at that or any other school. These were roles written for white actors. Shakespeare’s work is not, to be sure, replete with black characters, and there are only so many times a school can do Othello. Likewise, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown was written before the introduction of the comic strip’s one black character, Franklin. Although Ms. Moore added a few lines to the script and had a black kid deliver them in the person of Franklin (and created an entirely new character for Carol Stuart, one of the few black students in the theatre class), this hardly altered the racial dynamic at work.
To be white at that school, as in many others, was to have a whole world of extracurricular opportunity opened to oneself—a world where if you were a mediocre student (as I was), you could still find a niche, an outlet for your talents, passions, and interests. To be of color at that same school was to ensure that no matter how good an actor or actress you were, or were capable of becoming, you were unlikely to be in a position to avail yourself of this same outlet for your creativity. Unless a theatre teacher is prepared to violate the aesthetic sensibilities of the audience, which is rare, and cast a person of color in a role traditionally played by a white person (like Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, or Snoopy even), black, Latino, and Asian kids are just out of luck.
This, it should be noted, is no mere academic point. Theatre was a life raft for me in middle school, without which I might well have gone under altogether. My ability to access it, and the whiteness that granted me that ability, was no minor consideration. By the time middle school began, my home life was increasingly chaotic. My father’s drinking had gone well past heavy, on the way to serious alcoholism. Though he was still technically functional—and would remain so, more or less, right up until he got sober eighteen years later—his addiction propelled his internalized rage and sense of failure forward, which would explode time and again in our small apartment, always aimed directly at my mother. Though she absorbed the nightly verbal blows and tried her best to shield me from the damage, each fight, each hateful word, each guttural expression of unhinged contempt cut deeply into my sense of personal security.
I took to closing myself off in my room after school most days. When he was around, I would only come out to eat dinner, always making sure to be back in my own personal space shortly thereafter, as the drinking continued and the fights were sure to begin. Then, on those occasions when he would go out to a bar to drink more, I would force myself