are so few things we can be really proud about. We don’t have a university, we don’t have a real library, we don’t have art museums, we don’t have theaters or concert halls. When somebody talks about Mansfield, they talk about football.”
“What are you saying, Ma?” said Edna, now sixteen and still an outcast. “It’s not that we don’t have theaters or concert halls—we don’t want them! What we want is a gladiator spectacle on Friday nights. You know what it costs to fly the team around the state? Eighty, ninety thousand a semester! Mrs. Hart, the best teacher in the school, with a master’s and twenty years’ experience, makes half of what that idiot Crews makes.”
Still, it was sweet to open the year with a forty-seven-yard touchdown pass on the first offense of the first game of the season. The fans took it as an omen of future glory, and to heighten that supposition, the Tigers treated the Highland Park Scotties to a humiliating 24-3 defeat. Arnold threw three touchdown passes and completed thirteen of fifteen others, setting off the Hitler-Frame myth of the year, the “dream duo in black and white,” proof of Mansfield’s racial sophistication.
BJ Frame was a black receiving end, six foot one like Arnold but even faster. He had starred at Terrell in his junior year and was the prize catch of Mansfield’s reluctant white fishermen. He and Arnold were not only a phenomenal team on the field over the year but they also became fast friends, the only real black-white combo at the school.
BJ began his association with Arnold with a defining act: “Hey, Mr. Doctor White Boy, I got something to show you.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“The bus station. In the black restroom. I thought you might be interested.”
Arnold examined the document, an unlined three-by-five card, neatly typed, the corners still bearing shards of scotch tape. At the top, “NOTICE,” and underneath a list of prices the white author would pay for various types of sex with Negro girls of descending age. Services would be free to any Negro woman over twenty. From there, the writer offered to pay two dollars for a nineteen-year-old, three for an eighteen-year-old, four for seventeen, etc., up to seven-fifty for a fourteen-year-old and even more for children. The card listed a contact point and urged any Negro man sitting in the stall who wanted to earn $5 to bring his friend, with proof of age.
“What’s your take on that, professor?” BJ asked.
Arnold looked him in the eye.
“You know, there’s always been plenty of nigger-lovers after the sun goes down.”
BJ nodded.
That was it. The die was cast. They understood one another beyond the words that had been spoken.
When BJ heard Arnold was applying to Harvard, he said, “Hey, man, you’ll never get into Hahvahd with that peckerwood accent. And if you get in, you better keep your trap shut for four years, or they’ll kill you up there.” There weren’t many whites in Mansfield that had an ear into the black community—and vice versa.
Thursday night was lasagna night at the Hitlers’. Jacobo had kneewise suggested a Thursday lasagna night, and Arnold was just reporting the news to his mom. Anna took these “messages” with a grain of salt. In Ferrara, when people wanted something but didn’t want to take full responsibility, they would hold up a pinky to an ear, pretend to be listening, and then announce, “My little finger says you need to give me two hundred lira for ice cream.” But how did Arnold know that when she was growing up, Thursday was lasagna day? In any case, she did need a way to celebrate her son’s celebrity and acknowledge her grudging endorsement of “American football.” So she announced that as of the very next Thursday, she would comply with Jacobo and have a Tigers’ lasagna festival every week of the season. Arnold could invite four different teammates each week, and he would see—they would all play better on Friday.
“Better than what?”
“Better than the boys that won’t have my lasagna.”
It turned out to be true. And by midseason an invitation for Hitler lasagna had become part of the stew of superstitions in which the Tigers swam. Tie a double knot in your right shoe but a single one in your left, rub your forehead with end-zone grass before each half, spit twice before a fourth down, try to get invited to Hitlers’ on Thursday, or at least eat lasagna at home.
Before the first festival evening, Arnold tacked a paper sign across the dining room: GO HANG A SALAMI! I’M A LASAGNA HOG!. He hung the half a salami that was in the fridge from the light fixture over the table. “What’s that all about?” his mother wanted to know. “C’mon, Mom, study it up,” was all he would say.
The guests arrived at 6, a group of hulking teenagers emerging from one small Nash with the combined mass of seventeen clowns. Ken Hall, center; Joe Bob Arthur, the three-first-name fullback; Darryll Ramey, 215-pound tackle—“Looks like a double portion for that one,” George whispered to Anna; and BJ Frame, the first black person to have entered the Hitler house.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
“Beer?” George suggested.
“Not on weeknights,” Joe Bob explained. “Coach Crews would have our heads.”
“Dinner is served,” an accented voice announced, and the boys took seats at the table.
“In Italy, we always serve wine. Always. That’s why Italian football is better than American football.”
“Them’s fightin words, ma’am,” observed Darryll Ramey, friendly enough, but then again, you wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley.
They dug into the red-and-white helpings on their plates.
“Say, Arnold, what’s that salami doin hangin up there?” asked BJ.
“What do you think it’s doing?”
“Minds me of that effigy hangin up off the light at Broad and Main a couple of years ago. That guy Griffin, hangin there by the neck. Remember that?”
“I do,” said Arnold. “But no. It’s not Griffin.”
“Couldn’t get far enough away,” observed Joe Bob.
A whiff of racial tension sneaked across the table, which Arnold tried to disperse: “It’s not Griffin. It’s a salami. What’s salami spelled backward?”
“Imalas,” the group figured out, some checking the text on the sign.
“That’s pronounced ‘I’m a las,’” Arnold suggested.
“Hey, wait,” BJ called, “I got it. That whole sign reads the same frontways and back! Hitler, you are somethin! That’s amazing! But you know what? It still minds me of that Griffin hangin there.”
“He wasn’t ‘black like me,’” Ken Hall observed. “He was black for six weeks.”
“Well, that’s all past now,” said George. “Some of us had to be pushed, but there’s going to be integration in Mansfield, and things are already changing. Look at the team.”
BJ wanted to be polite. He had been trained to be polite. But he grabbed a teaching moment when he saw it as quickly as he grabbed a hole to run through. Fast on his feet, fast with his tongue.
“You know, Mr. Hitler, there’s integration and there’s integration. We fit as athletes, but we’re separate, still separate. Once we get off the field again? After the game? It’s like some magic change happens on Friday nights and we’re not just dumb niggers anymore. And then—back to reality.”
There was an embarrassed stillness in the room as several people silently agreed.
“There must be an angel passing over,” Anna said. “In Italy when the room suddenly is quiet, we say that.”
“If you’re strong and fast and black in Mansfield,” BJ continued, “you’re expected