Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (10 page)

I looked back and saw Mama. Through the window over the kitchen sink I saw Papa. He’s making sure she and I behave, I thought.

“It would be nice for the boys to go together,” Mama said. She came down the steps and across the yard.

You didn’t ask me! my silent angry self screamed. It’s not fair! You didn’t ask me! But Mama didn’t even look at me; she addressed herself to Mrs. Oklahoma as if Snivel Nose and I weren’t even there.

Then an unbelievable thought occurred to me. For some reason Denver had not told his mama about being chased home from school. Or if he did, he hadn’t mentioned me. He was too afraid, I decided. He knew what would happen if he squealed. But even that left me with an uneasy feeling. I looked at him to see if the answer was on his face. All I got was a weak twitch of a smile and a blink of his pleading eyes.

I was struck dumb by the entire negotiation. It was settled without my comment or consent, like watching someone bargain away my life. When I went back into the house, all of my pent-up anger exploded. I screamed and kicked my heels and even cried—but to no avail.

“You have two choices, young man,” my father warned. “Go to the matinee with Denver or stay in your room.” But his ominous tone of voice told me that there was another choice: a good belting on the rear end.

Of course, this Saturday the Rat House was showing a movie about one of our favorite subjects where the
mejicanos
whipped the gringos: the Alamo. I had to go. Los Indios were counting on me to let them in.

I walked the few blocks to town, a boy torn apart. One of me hurried eagerly toward the Saturday afternoon adventure. The other dragged his feet, scuffing the toes of his shoes
to spite his parents, all the while conscious of this hated stranger walking silently beside him.

When we came within sight of the theater, I felt Denver tense and slow his pace even more than mine. “Your gang is waiting,” he said, and I swear he started to tremble.

What a chicken, I thought. “You’re with me,” I said. But then he had reminded me. What would I tell Chango and the rest of Los Indios?

They came at us with a rush. “What’s he doing here?” Chango snarled.

I tried to explain. They deflected my words and listened instead to the silent fear they heard as they scrutinized Denver. My explanation did not wash, so I tried something in desperation.

“He’s not what you think,” I said. Skepticism and disbelief. “Just because he doesn’t understand Spanish doesn’t mean he can’t be one of us.” Show me! Chango’s expression said. “He’s—he’s—” My voice was so loud that a passerby turned and stared. “He’s an Indian from Oklahoma,” I lied.

“A blond Indian?” They all laughed.

My capacity for lying ballooned in proportion to their disbelief. I grew indignant, angry, self-righteous. “Yes!” I shouted. “An albino Indian!”

The laughs froze in their throats, and they looked at each other, seeing their own doubts mirrored in their friends’ eyes. “Honest to God?” Chango asked.

“Honest to God!”

“Does he have money?”

Denver unfolded a sweaty fist to show the dime in his palm. Chango took it quickly, like a rooster pecking a kernel of corn. “Run to the dime store,” he commanded the fastest of his lackeys. “Get that hard candy that lasts a long time. And hurry. We’ll meet you in the back.”

Denver’s mouth fell open but not a sound emerged.
“When we see him running back,” Chango said to me, “you buy the ticket and let us in.” Then he riveted his suspicious eyes on Denver and said, “Talk Indian.”

I don’t remember what kind of gibberish Denver faked. It didn’t have to be much, because our runner had dashed across the street and down the block and was already sprinting back.

Our seven-for-the-price-of-one worked as always. When the theater was dark, we moved to our favorite seats. In the meantime, I had drawn Denver aside and maliciously told him he had better learn some Spanish. When we came to the crucial part of the movie, he had to shout what I told him.

It was a memorable Saturday. The hard sugar candy lasted through two cartoons and half of the first feature. We relived the story of the Alamo again—we had seen this movie at least twice before, and we had seen other versions more times than I can remember. When the crucial, climactic attack began, we started our chant. I elbowed Denver to shout what I had taught him.

“
¡Maten los gringos!
” Kill the gringos! Then others in the audience took up the chant, while Flash Gordo ran around in circles trying to shush us up.

I sat in secret pleasure, a conqueror of two worlds. To my left was this blond Indian shouting heresies he little dreamed of, while I was already at least as proficient in English as he. On my right were my fellow tribesmen, who had accepted my audacious lie and welcomed this albino redskin into our group.

But memory plays its little tricks. Years later, when I couldn’t think of Denver’s name, I would always remember the Alamo—and John Wayne. There were probably three or four movies about that infamous mission, but John Wayne’s was the one that stuck in my mind. Imagine my shock when I learned that his movie had not been made until 1960, by
which time I was already through high school, had two years of college, and had gone to work. There was no way we could have seen the John Wayne version when I was in the first grade.

Looking back, I realized that Wayne, as America’s gringo hero, was forever to me the bigoted Indian hater of
The Searchers
fused with the deserving victim of the attacking Mexican forces at the Alamo—the natural enemy of the Cisco Kid.

Another of my illusions shattered hard when I later learned that in real life Wayne had married a woman named Pilar or Chata or maybe both. That separated the man, the actor, from the characters he portrayed and left me in total confusion.

But then life was never guaranteed to be simple. For I saw the beak of the chick I was at six years old pecking through the hard shell of my own preconceptions. Moving into an alien land. First hating, then becoming friends with aliens like my blond Indian Okie friend, Denver, and finally becoming almost an alien myself.

DARRYL PINCKNEY

No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was something I figured out on the sly, late in my childhood career as a snoop, like discovering that babies didn’t come from an exchange of spinach during a kiss. The great thing about finding out I was a Negro was that I could look forward to going places in the by and by that I would not have been asked to as a white boy.

There was nothing to be afraid of as long as we were polite and made good grades. After all, the future, back then, assembled as we were on the glossy edge of the New Frontier, belonged to us, the Also Chosen. The future was something my parents were either earning or keeping for my two sisters and me, like the token checks that came on birthdays from grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts.

The future was put away for us, the way dark-blue blazers were put away until we could grow into them, the way meat-loaf was wrapped up for the next nervous quiz meal and answers to our stormy looks were stored up for that tremendous tomorrow. Every scrap of the future mattered, but I didn’t have to worry my breezy head about it because someone was seeing to things and had been ever since my great-grandfather’s grandmother stepped on the auction block.

All men were created equal, but even so, lots of mixed messages with sharp teeth waited under my Roy Rogers pillow. You were just as good as anyone else out there, but they—whoever “they” were—had rigged things so that you
had to be close to perfect just to break even. You had nothing to fear, though every time you left the house for a Spelling Bee or a Music Memory Contest the future of the future hung in the balance. You were not an immigrant, there were no foreign accents, weird holidays, or funny foods to live down, but still you did not belong to the great beyond out there; yet though you did not belong it was your duty as the Also Chosen to get up and act as though you belonged, especially when no one wanted you to.

You had nothing to be ashamed of, though some of the Also Chosen talked in public at the top of their lungs, said “Can I get” instead of “May I have,” and didn’t say “please” ever. United we stood, which did not include everyone on the block. It wasn’t right to think you were better than your neighbor, but it also wasn’t smart to want to be like the kids who ran up and down the alley all day and were going to end up on a bad corner in front of a record shop dancing under the phonograph speaker strapped above the door.

Forgiveness was divine, but people who moved away from you at the movies, tried to short-change you at the new shopping mall, or didn’t want you to have a table at the Indianapolis Airport restaurant would get what was coming to them, though they acted that way because they didn’t know any better. All you had to do was ignore them, pretend you hadn’t heard. Those who dwelled in the great beyond out there could not stop His truth from marching on, but until His truth made it as far as restricted Broadripple Park, you did not go swimming, because even the wading pool at Douglas Park had something floating in it that put your mother off. Douglas Park was not much fun. There were no train engines to climb over, no hand-carved carousels. The YMCA that met there let its beginning swimmers splash naked. Your father could step around whatever turned up in the water as often as he liked, but if you and your sisters got sick from
swallowing something other than chlorine your mother was going to go back to her mother in Atlanta and never speak to your father again.

To know where you were going, you had to know where you’d come from, though the claims that the past had on you were like cold hands in the dark. Those elderly relatives, old-timers in charcoal-gray suits and spinsters in musty foxtails, who went out of their way to come to Indianapolis to have a look at you, those wizards licking gold fillings and widows coughing on their bifocals whom you didn’t want to travel miles and miles or eat ice cream with—they were among the many pearly reasons you had to hold your Vaselined head high, though you were never to mention in company your father’s Uncle Ralph Waldo, who had lived the blues so well that he wound up in a nuthouse without the sense he was born with because of a disease. Grandfather Eustace spelled its name so fast not even your sisters were able to catch the letters.

Above all, you had to remember that no one not family was ever going to love you really. The Also Chosen were one big happy family, though the elderly relatives who hung over holidays like giant helium balloons couldn’t stand the sight of one another, which gave fuel to the blue flame of confidences and bitter fine points that burned until the stars folded up. Sometimes the old-timers seemed to be all there was. They far outnumbered their younger relatives. The family tapered off, depopulated itself from shelf to shelf, but the ranks of the old-timers promised never to thin. They enlisted the departed in their number, on their side, which added to their collective power to dominate those of you who would never know what they knew.

The old-timers boasted of their ability to bug you from the grave, saying one day you’d want to talk to them and they wouldn’t be there anymore. They’d hint that they’d be
watching you closely from wherever they went when they passed on. Your dearest reminded you every morning of the problem that you would never, never get away from. However, escape I did, the burden of consciousness was lifted from my round little shoulders, and for a while there I was gorgeously out of it.

TIFFANY MIDGE

Day 1

There are no travel brochures for the reservation vacation. No glossy posters and prints depicting pairs of Indian lovers intertwined along the concrete shores of the Fort Peck Dam. There’s no 1–800 number to call ahead and secure reservations. Consider yourself already booked. The only travel agency you’ll want to call is the tribal one at the edge of town. They’ll ensure that you belong, that your stay is comfortable, that you’ll return home refreshed. If you want, they’ll even offer to enroll you—issue you a photo ID. If you don’t fully qualify as a member of the tribe, they’ll refer you to other bands that are advertising—maybe you could roadie.

Day 2

It’s July the 4th. Poplar is celebrating its Centennial. I can’t remember if the old saying goes
Good luck comes in threes
or if it’s
Bad luck goes in threes.
Either way, this town has opened every window, shaken out the rugs, and hung out every piece of laundry on the line. Downtown is a regular three-ring circus. Crepe-paper floats are sailing through Main Street carrying 500 years of forgiveness, 216 years of red-blooded American pride, and 100 years of a prospector’s wet dream. Smokie the Bear is lumbering behind a Dodge Dakota four-by-four filled with buffalo robes and Indian princesses waving sparklers. The Poplar Junior High marching band is
creeping behind the pioneer’s horse-drawn covered wagon to the tune of the motion-picture theme song “Eye of the Tiger.” The Fort Peck troop of Vietnam war vets are dodging the missives of Bozo the Clown’s Tootsie Pop ambush. The Poplar High School pep squad is passing out their high-kick rendition of spirit to a crowd of Japanese tourists wearing
Northern Exposure
T-shirts. The troop members of Desert Storm are being pursued by the ghosts from the Seventh Cavalry who are topped with nondairy Dream Whip. A John Deere tractor is pulling a tinfoil-wrapped Santa Maria filled with evangelist missionaries treading behind a tragic clown’s trail of tears. BIA agents in ten-gallon hats are dishing out miniature flags to a congregation of undercover AIM activists posing as nuns and cheerleaders. This evening I write a postcard to my coworkers.

Hey guys! Today I witnessed 500 years crammed into a mini-segment of 60
Minutes.
Andy Rooney would love this! After today, I know for sure that the melting pot is definitely melting. Perhaps we should recycle it and repair the Liberty Bell. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.

Day 3