“Yeah, and most of the world is right, is that what you’re saying? Hey, you’re not going to change this woman,” Clarence said. “No telling what she’s been through. Maybe some blacks beat her up once. Who knows?”
“Well, that doesn’t justify how she treated you.”
“But if I hadn’t told you to pay attention, you wouldn’t have even noticed it. That’s why when you ask whites—my fellow conservatives, anyway—if there’s still racism, they’ll say maybe a little, but not much, and they’ll go on and on about reverse racism. I don’t really blame them. They can only see what happens to them. They can’t see what I see, because they don’t live inside black skin.”
“It bothers me, Clabern. I want to do something about it.” Clarence thought he saw a tear in the corner of Jake’s eye. It surprised him.
“You did the best you could. You saw it. You didn’t tell me I was just oversensitive, that I imagined the whole thing.”
“It was so obvious,” Jake said.
“Only if your eyes are open to it. Same thing happened when we were in here last week. You didn’t notice then. It’s no different than what I get a dozen times a day.”
“Really?”
“Really. Well, maybe not a dozen any more. But a couple anyway. Remember a few weeks ago when Geneva and I were out to dinner with you and Janet?”
“At Red Robin’s?”
“Right. When the waiter brought the check, do you remember me being a little irritable? Later Geneva told me it showed.”
“Yeah, I do remember. You seemed upset. Janet and I couldn’t figure it out.”
“How many times have we been out to dinner together, the four of us?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “Over a dozen.”
“Pop quiz. Every single place we’ve been, every single time when the servers come up with the check, what have they done with it?”
“Put it on the table.”
“Well, yes, but who do they put it in front of?”
Jake looked bewildered, then the light turned on. “Me?”
“Every time. No exceptions. Do you know how that makes me feel?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Like the white man has to pick up the tab for the black man. Like black men don’t make money, or if they do they spend it on drugs or fancy cars. I know the dance, Jake.”
“You always want to pick up the tab,” Jake said. “I have to arm wrestle you so I can pay my share.”
“Usually I don’t let it bother me like that. But I’ve just been fed up lately. Geneva says I’m under stress. Anyway, that’s what happened that night. Then we went over to the mall, to Meier & Frank, remember? Well, we hadn’t been there five minutes before the security guard was on me like white on rice. Finally, Geneva and I went and sat on a bench. It just takes the fun out of shopping.”
“I knew something was wrong,” Jake said. “But I had no idea what.”
“You know how you’re always trying to get me to go to that IHOP over on Burnside?”
“Yeah. I’ve never been able to figure out why you won’t meet me there.”
“Because one evening I dropped by there late. A waiter mistook me for a troublemaker who’d walked off a few days before without paying. He was giving me a hard time, brought over the manager and the whole deal. I explained he was mistaking me for someone else; he said he was sure it was me. I got up and walked out. Never been back since. This waiter just couldn’t live with the inconvenience of having to distinguish one black man from another. Could have happened anywhere, but it left a real bad taste in my mouth. And bad tastes and restaurants don’t go together.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Clarence shrugged. “Sounds like whining, doesn’t it? Like I’m another oversensitive black man. Besides, it’s a little embarrassing.”
“Still, I wish you’d told me. It makes sense now, but I was in the dark. Clabern… I didn’t realize stuff like this still happens.”
Clarence shrugged. “Did you hear what happened when I dropped by Hugh’s house a few weeks ago?”
“What?” Jake didn’t know Hugh well, only that he was the ex-all-American sports editor.
“We go into his house and his phone rings. I’m standing right there when he answers, and I can tell he’s uncomfortable. He says, ‘No, everything’s okay. Thanks for calling. No, I understand.’ So I’m standing there trying to get Hugh to tell me who it was.”
“So who was it?”
“The neighbor lady. One of those neighborhood watch communities, you know. She was calling to tell Hugh there was a black man on his porch. When Hugh told me, I busted out laughing.”
“But it really wasn’t funny, was it?”
“No.” He looked deadly serious now. “Sometimes you laugh because you’re tired of getting mad. Sometimes it doesn’t bother me, I’m so used to it. But when I’m at a low ebb, it gets to me. The thing is, at my last two churches in Gresham, I was the only black man. People think they know me, but they don’t. They don’t describe me as the smart guy or the friendly guy or the guy that loves his family. I’m ‘that big black guy.’ I don’t blame them for that. But my skin color doesn’t say anything about what’s inside, good or bad.”
“To be honest,” Jake said, “a few times I’ve thought maybe you were reading in racism when it wasn’t there. But I’m starting to see it differently.”
“I’m sure sometimes I do read it in. But when you know it’s real with some people, it’s hard not to assume it’s there with others. Like when I was working part-time as a chauffeur when I was in college. All the guys would tell what they made in tips every day. And I always made the least, even though I swear I worked harder than any of them. There’s no way I can prove white people wouldn’t give me decent tips because I was black. But I’ll always believe that. Maybe it’s my own fault. I put my expectations too high. Now my dad, he learned not to expect too much, so he’s usually not so disappointed.”
After several seconds of silence, Jake reached across the table and squeezed Clarence’s hand. “Thanks for telling me this, friend.”
“Thanks for listening.”
“How about next time we come to your house for dinner, Geneva fixes up soul food? Sometimes you talk about the stuff you eat, and I don’t even know what some of it is.”
“Like what?”
“Collard greens or chitlins, for instance. Never had ’em.”
“You don’t know what chitlins are, do you?”
“Nope.”
“Tell you what, you promise me you won’t look it up in the dictionary, and we’ll have you over this weekend. We’ll serve chitlins out the wazoo. I’ll talk to Geneva tonight.”
“Great.” After the conversation went a different direction Jake said, “Have you talked to Ollie yet?”
“A couple of times.”
“About the brutality charge?”
“No.” Clarence felt his shoulders tense.
“When you do, ask him about Bam Robie.”
“What about him?”
Jake told Clarence a story he wasn’t sure he believed. He jotted down the name Bam Robie on the back of a business card. After another few minutes, the two men headed for the deli’s front door. As they walked out, Clarence heard a friendly voice twenty feet away talking to someone else. He wondered if Jake heard it too.
“Good afternoon, sir. Keeping dry? Seen our special? What can I do for you?”
Clarence checked his e-mail back at the Trib. Eight messages. One was from Raylon Berkley. He selected that one first.
“Clarence, Jess tells me you’re headed to Chicago to do background for a column. I have an old friend, Sam Knight, who owns the Chicago Ritz. He’s always saying come and stay and he’ll pick up the tab. I’ve never had time to take him up on it. Well, I called Sam yesterday, and it’s all set. You’ll be staying there all three days. Contact Mimi for details. P.S. Who says the Trib doesn’t treat its employees first class?”
Clarence sighed with mixed anticipation and frustration. He’d planned on staying at his cousin Franky’s, in the old hood at Cabrini Green. Not that it was a nice place to stay, but there was a certain nostalgia, and besides, it was part of his research for a feature article related to inner-city life, and a few columns to boot. Oh, well. The Ritz would be a lot nicer and a lot safer.
Not that I have much choice. You don’t turn down Mr. Raylon Berkley’s generosity.
Just as Clarence was packing up his briefcase at four-thirty, Sid Grady stopped him. “Mount Hood courts tomorrow morning at eight, right?”
“Right,” Clarence said. “See you there, man.”
“Hey, look out, big guy. I feel my luck changin’. Beat Ekstrom a couple days ago, 6-3, 6-2.”
“Wow. Wish I had time to get ready for you.”
Grady was a sportswriter who’d played singles in high school and a year or two in college and was still a good athlete. Clarence headed to his car, smiling to himself, feeling slightly guilty he’d misled Grady. He wondered what Grady’d think if he knew Clarence’s racquet and sports bag full of tennis balls were in the back of his car and where he was headed now. It wasn’t just Grady he was gunning for. Sid would be a tune-up for Norcoast.
Clarence did what he’d done twenty years earlier, in college. He went to the local courts to hit against the wall. He wouldn’t leave until he hit a hundred forehands, a hundred backhands, fifty volleys on both sides, and fifty good serves each to the deuce and ad courts. It didn’t matter if it took him thirty minutes or two hours. He would stay until he accomplished his goals. He always did.
Clarence had taken up tennis his junior year of college, a strange sport for an offensive lineman and even stranger for a black man. A white teammate, Greg, a wide receiver, introduced him to the game. But what really turned him on to tennis was Arthur Ashe.
It was 1975, and for the first time ever Clarence watched Wimbledon. He witnessed Arthur Ashe, toward the end of his career, bobbing and weaving his way to the final against Jimmy Connors, the number one player in the world. The commentators congratulated Ashe for making it so far. To be number two at Wimbledon was nothing to sneeze at. Everyone knew Connors would win.
It wasn’t just that tennis was a game of upper-class suburban privilege. It was that Connors was quicker and stronger and hit harder than Ashe. Clarence watched that day, hoping Ashe would surprise them all and maybe take it to four or five sets. But something happened that day, and as he watched, something happened inside Clarence. Ashe out-thought Connors, strategized, refused to play into his power game. He didn’t give him anything to tee off on, nothing to let him establish his rhythm and take over the game. Clearly, Connors should have won. But he didn’t. The gold Wimbledon trophy landed in the hands of a black man, and the favored white man held only the silver tray. Clarence screamed and hollered in front of his television set as if he’d won the match himself.
That afternoon Clarence had gone out and hit against the walls and practiced serving for three hours. The next day when he played his teammate Greg, he beat him for the first time.
Almost every day back then he’d gone out and hit against those walls. He played hard through his junior year, meeting players on the tennis team and getting their help. His senior year he went out for the team. Incredibly, he made it, first as a backup player, then as fourth doubles, and by the end of the season as third. The tennis coach told him he’d never seen anyone take up a sport his junior year and make a major college varsity team his senior year. It was unthinkable. But Clarence did it. His coach told him it probably helped that he took up so much space on the court his opponent couldn’t hit it where he wasn’t.
A hundred forehand ground strokes.
Clarence habitually beat players born and bred in elite racquet clubs. He once whipped a guy who paid more for his tennis racket than Clarence had for his car, that 1967 Hillman Minx that he filled to overflowing. He loved the discipline of readiness, physical and mental. He loved every facet of the game, from his crushing serve, to rushing the net, to hitting the hard topspin passing shot or the lob four inches from the baseline. He watched his opponents swear and kick the court and occasionally throw down their racquets in frustration, wondering how this guy was beating them. In contrast, he always smiled and acted the gentleman.
A hundred backhand ground strokes.
What drew him to tennis was strategy. It was a thinking man’s sport. Clarence belonged to Cascade Athletic Club in Gresham, a great facility where he could play through the winter. But on any nice weekend, he played outdoors if he could. He looked forward to facing off with Grady. He knew the face he’d see on the other side would be Norcoast’s, not Grady’s.
He hit the ball over and over against the concrete wall. He never liked the theory that blacks are naturally supeiror athletes. It implied they could get away with being lazy, undisciplined, or stupid, whereas white guys could make it only because they’d overcome their genes by being smart and working hard. One of his favorite football players, whom he’d personally interviewed once, was Jerry Rice, the all-pro Forty-niners receiver. No one worked as hard as Rice. He always came to practice early, always stayed late, always studied the game films over and over. Rice wasn’t the best receiver in NFL history just because of black genes. He was a hard worker, disciplined, smart, and studious.
Fifty forehand volleys.
In college Clarence had chosen for a course project to do a study of all the arguments for keeping blacks out of professional sports, articulated in the newspapers of the thirties and forties. The sportswriters reasoned that blacks lacked the mental discipline, the brains, the ability to focus that athletics demanded. Now, fifty years later, blacks had carved out a dominant role in many professional sports, and did anybody credit some of this to discipline, smarts, and ability to focus? No. It was just the luck of good African jungle, plowboy, cotton-pickin’, bale-liftin’ genes. In the ways that mattered to Clarence, blacks didn’t get any credit before, and they got little now.
Fifty backhand volleys.
When Joe Louis whipped Max Schmeling, when Jesse Owens won the gold to the dismay of the lily-white Hitler in the stands, it sent a message that would later open the door for Jackie Robinson and finally burst the floodgates. Whites had so many heroes, from presidents to the Wright brothers, from Einstein to Schweitzer, from Superman to the Green Hornet, from movie stars to Miss America, from Red Grange to Joe Dimaggio. As a child, Clarence had clung to every black hero he knew, including his father. Maybe that was why it was so hard for so many to let go O. J.
Fifty good serves to the deuce court.
Fifty good serves to the ad court.
After an hour of hard work, soaking with sweat, Clarence headed home, feeling ready for his match with Grady the next morning. Clarence would be lying in wait for him and for Norcoast. Grady had never beaten him. Tomorrow would be no exception.
“Accosted right out in front of your sister’s place?” Ollie shook his head. “You got protection?”
“She’s carrying pepper spray when she walks,” Clarence said, “but she’s not walking alone any more. If no one’s with her, she’s driving. I borrowed Jake’s shotgun and ordered a handgun. Familiar with the Glock 17?”
“Sure. That’s the hardware that caused all the ‘plastic gun’ hysteria in the eighties. You know, supposedly wouldn’t trigger the alarm in airport metal detectors? Ever see The Fugitive? Tommy Lee Jones carries a Glock 17. Then he uses its little brother, the Glock 19, for backup. You know, the gun he pulls out of the fanny pack in the storm sewer.”
“Interesting what different people notice in a movie,” Clarence said.
“Cops notice cop stuff. Like, every time Jones puts the Glock 17 in his hand, he racks the slide to chamber a round. Truth is, there’s not a cop in the country who carries his gun with an empty chamber. The slide rack makes for good Hollywood, I guess. On the street it could get you killed. ’Scuse me, Mr. Armed Felon, but see, I haven’t
chambered a round yet, so could you hold off pluggin’ me till I do it, just to even the odds?’”
“I got one with a laser on it,” Clarence said.
“No kidding? Why?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t fired a gun in years. Guess it could help my accuracy.”
“Maybe. Cops tend to shy away from lasers. They can make you dependent and overconfident. Then you get out on a bright day, you can’t even see the thing and you freeze. And you can imagine the confusion of a room full of laser equipped SWAT cops. You don’t know whose dot belongs to who. A friend with DC Metro police told me about some officers who got in the habit of playing laser tag around the station. Well, one of the guys forgot to unload. He tagged an officer with a round to the stomach. He lived, but it was all pretty embarrassing. The moral is, be careful with your laser gun. It’s not a toy.”
“If it was, I wouldn’t have bought it.”
“The really cool lasers are the infrared ones,” Ollie said. “They’re only visible with night vision equipment, so the subject doesn’t know he’s being tagged. Talk about stealth. Some of those lasers can go three hundred yards. Can you imagine? Wonder how long before the gangs get them.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure. Some gangs have started using explosives. Dynamite, bombs, Molotov cocktails, military weapons. The fully automatics. Look at our HK53. It escalates. Morals and respect for human life are all that would hold you back from using that stuff. Otherwise, it’s just, ‘If I can get my hands on it, I’ll use it.’ All it takes is money, and drugs bring in plenty of that. You just spend your illegal money to buy illegal weapons. It all adds up to a war zone with lots of casualties.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Already has. Unless things turn around, it’ll get worse. What’s going to stop it? It’s all a battle for dominion. Who’s going to rule the turf? Who’s going to have the final word?”
They both sat quietly, sagging under the weight of the topic.
“Ollie?” Clarence wondered if he looked as uncomfortable as he felt. “What was the deal with your brutality charge?”