Nigger in the Window

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by David Wright

Funny joke, Darryl thinks. Yeah. Real funny. The day the joke was told though, Darryl hadn't laughed. He might have laughed had a Black friend, Two or somebody, told it to a group of Blacks. But no Black face other than his had peppered the rustling sheet of White laughter lining the hallway that day - back in high school, back home in Fitzgerald, Texas - so Darryl kept still. He wrestled down the smile wrestling his lips into activity and slipped away from the crowd where the joke was told. His friend Kevin Walton, who told it, ran after him.

"Darryl . . .," he called, catching up.

"Damn, Kevin," was all Darryl said, steadily striding down the hall.

"C'mon Darryl," Kevin said. "It was just a joke."

"In bad taste. Especially in front of me."

"C'mon, man. You know I, we . . . . Nobody looks at you that way."

"What way?"

"You know," Kevin said. "As Black."

"Then what the fuck am I, Kevin!" . . .

Darryl squats, his naked knees pulled up to his bare chest, leaning back against the cool plaster of the wall. Minnesota night cold outside the window snaps a sting into the air and stretches across the dormitory room. The still falling snows of late March accumulate in upside-down white arcs on the sill outside the glass, slowly climbing the sides but leaving a bright valley at the bottom. Darryl looks from the window over to Cathy Collins, asleep on his small twin bed, her pale skin glowing in the dark.

What's it called when niggers toting gifts go calling door-to-door? . . .

"C'mon, Darryl," Kevin said, his head buried into the collar of his green-and-gold letter jacket.

Kevin Walton. At Fitzgerald High, he and Darryl found themselves confronted with friendship. Growing up, they lived four houses apart in Oakbrook Heights and always ended up on the same side in summer league baseball. Then, in high school, they shared the same backfield on the football team, were ranked number two and three in their class, and soon ended up sitting side by side in the upper-level courses, passing them with an equality of ease.

. . . Father's Day in the Flats.

But then Kevin got riled himself. "Lay off it, will you?" he said. "It was just a joke. You're walking around with a chip on your shoulder. That . . ."

"A chip on my shoulder! You call me a nigger in front of everybody . . ."

"I didn't call you a nigger."

"You talked about 'nigger this' and 'nigger that.'"

"I didn't call you a nigger," Kevin corrected him. "It was a joke. It was about guys not knowing who their fathers are . . ."

"It was about Black guys not knowing who their fathers are."

"All right," Kevin conceded. "It was about Black guys not knowing who their fathers are."

Then Darryl said, "I've never met my real father."

This was new information to Kevin, and Darryl watched his face shift while the information registered in his mind.

"Still. Darryl, look," Kevin said. "I'm sorry, okay? It's just . . . I'm sorry."

Darryl remembers feeling bad for Kevin. He remembers looking at his friend, who was hardly able to look up at him, feeling sorry for his discomfort and telling him to forget it. What's it called when niggers toting gifts go calling door-to-door? And, squatting in the cold so far away, Darryl remembers Peggy McPherson - Kevin's girlfriend, his own good friend - looking from Darryl to the ground while the whole group laughed, wanting to laugh with the rest and trying not to. Father's Day in the Flats.

"The Flats," Darryl thinks. What a weird and ugly name for a neighborhood. Even as a kid, he liked "Beezville" so much better. The faded mural on the side of Booker T. Washington Junior High School, the husky black-and-gold bee with the menacing smirk. Beezville seemed more volatile, more dangerous. Proud.

But what the hell was "the Flats"? What was it supposed to refer to? The houses there? Because they were one-storied, because they were rickety and small and when the wind blew outside you felt it inside? They might as well have called it "the Shacks" then. That would be a more fitting name. But "Flats." What's "the Flats"?

The Flats was tired. The Town Council closed Booker T. Junior High to integrate it into the larger Fitzgerald J.H.S.; then they decided it was racially offensive to refer publicly to Beezville as Beezville anymore (although most of the older people still did). So the children went to Fitzgerald Junior High and later Fitzgerald High, home of the Fightin' Pioneers, and when their teachers talked about where the Black children lived, they talked about the Flats. And the children were uncomfortable and embarrassed - ashamed - and they weren't sure why. And even though Darryl's family didn't live there, he was ashamed, too.

"The Flats" sounded like a bad word, but actually it was Darryl's stepfather, Jack Mitchell, who first used it to describe Beezville.

Jack Mitchell. He seemed like such an ominous figure to Darryl as a kid: big and wide and always looming about, like a dark bank of clouds in spring. Now, Darryl can only imagine him as he is, as he'd seen him his last time home from college, over summer break: Jack Mitchell was big but round, a once normal-sized man gone soft, and balding, who now looked more like an over-sized and over-dressed brown egg. Jack Mitchell was so unlike Darryl's real father, Cameron Frederick Young: unlike how Darryl had imagined him to be before he actually met him, and how he really turned out to be, too.