Chapter 43: A Reflection on a Painful Memory Reported by a Dear Friend The next semester, my last as an undergrad, was more

or less uneventful. Things progressed as youd expect them to progress. My friends continued to be themselves. I was glad to have them around. Funny, interesting, very smart people. All good, fine, okay, but not much to talk about here. There are lots of stories that would be fun and interesting and even informative to tell but this book is already way too long so Im leaving them out. But then one night something happened that was different. One night in March Beatriz and I were walking back to the dorm after dinner at the Elliston Place Soda Shop, which Beatriz said she liked because it reminded her of restaurants around Wadley. I liked it because I liked the food. That night Id had country-style steak with mashed potatoes, turnip greens, and cornbread. Beatriz had roast beef with gravy, rice, string beans and biscuits.1 She also had iced tea and banana cream pie for dessert. I had water and no dessert. I drink a lot of water, so the waitresses at Ellistons would bring me a pitcher of it when I sat down to save themselves from having to refill my glass every sixty seconds. On our fairly quiet walk back to the dorm Beatriz was carrying her green hardback copy of the Girl Scout Handbook2 sealed in a large-ish Baggie clutched to her breast with both hands, the way she did. We didnt have a lot to say that night, but we were comfortable being quiet with each other. It was a nice night and the stars were out. It had been warmer during the day but the temperature began to drop pretty quickly as soon as the sun went down, which it did around six. Daylight Savings Time wouldnt start until late April.

We walked along in silence until we reached the freshman mens quadrangle3 with its large magnolia trees. She smiled and looked at me every few seconds as we walked, as though she was happy to be there and wanted to say something but wasnt sure what it was she wanted to say. After a while she cleared her throat, stopped, and stood up straight, ready to talk. Shed decided what she wanted to say. We were right at the geometric center of the quad, or as near as we could be given the magnolia trees. She was still hugging her little green book to her breast. I stopped and looked at her expectantly.

Have I mentioned this before? In the seventies, what are now called green beans had a tough string down the underside and so we called them string beans. When I was a kid and my mom was in the states shes sit on the couch watching television with a brown paper bag on her lap, snapping the string beans and pulling out the string. The people that produce the Burpees seed catalogue had used selective breeding to get rid of the tough string by sometime in the eighties, but green beans dont taste like string beans did.w 2 Girl Scout Handbook Intermediate Program, Girl Scouts of America (4th Ed, 1949). 3 I think its real name was Kissam Quadrangle. It was six identical dorms arranged around a quadrangle. When Id lived there, Id lived on the third floor of Hemmingway, and I think the one at the other end of the quad was named Kissam Hall. When I was there, all of the residents of all six of the dorms on the quad were freshman men. Sometime in 2011, it appears the six dorms of Kissam Quad were all torn down and the university began construction of an enormous structure also called Kissam Quadrangle but which was much more elaborate and massive than the freshman quad had been.

Why are you so alone, Henry Baida? she asked me, after a brief pause. It was dark but not so dark that I couldnt see that her eyes widened and she smiled as she asked. Oh, I think its just my nature, I answered. I shrugged. Youre pretty solitary. Why do you think that is? I asked. Oh, that is a very different question, Henry Baida. I am solitary because I make others uncomfortable. You are alone because you choose to be? she said. You dont make me uncomfortable, I said. I had to be careful here, because she was right, in a way. Dear, sweet, brilliant, Brazilian Beatriz had some eccentric mannerisms and Id noticed that lots of people regarded her charming inherent weirdness somewhat judgmentally, which I didnt understand. Unless somebodys trying to cheat you or hurt you, or being obnoxious or annoying, why would you care if shes a little odd? Beatriz was none of those things, so why did women who belonged to sororities, for example, seem to have such strong opinions about her? I know, Henry Baida. Nothing makes you uncomfortable. Not charging lions or gay stoners or difficult rednecks or peculiar girls from Wadley. We resumed walking, slowly. There was no moon but there was enough light to see. There werent many streetlights on campus, but there was some light from the quads dorm room windows. I encounter so few charging lions, I said. Just as I said it I heard the faint sound of hoof beats in the distance. We were standing on the sidewalk at the northwest end freshman quad, close to Kirkland Hall, and the hoof beat sound seemed to be coming from the other end, the southeast end closest to Tex Ritters4, maybe a hundred yards away. I squinted down through the darkness and watched as a red-eyed zebra galloped past left to right towards the law school. It was only in sight for a few seconds. I turned to look at Beatriz. But if you did encounter a charging lion, you would be unfazed, Henry Baida, she said. Um, did you see that? I asked. I see many things, Henry Baida? she said. How about a zebra, right down there? With maybe glowing red eyes? I asked. Yes, of course I saw it, Henry. It was there. Why would I not?
4

Tex Ritters was a burger joint on West End across from Hemmingway Hall, where Henry lived his freshman year. Tex Ritter was a singing cowboy who was in westerns, a type of movie popular in the 1950s that resembled modern movies about the American frontier of the nineteenth century not as much as one might think. Tex Ritters was a failed attempt to establish a beachhead in the chain restaurant business, as was the Minnie Pearls Fried Chicken chain that occupied the same building either immediately before or immediately after Tex Ritters, I forget.

And you dont think thats kind of weird? I asked. Henry Baida, improbable things happen every day. Dont let them distract you from what youre about. Father Tom taught me that. Okay, I said. You were saying, she said, and started walking again. Well, I forget, what with one thing and another. You commented that you encountered few charging lions and I had posited that when and if you did so you would be unfazed? she said. Yeah, well, thats the kind of thing you cant really know until you get there, I said, as the sound of hoof beats faded into the night. You are never fazed, Henry Baida. That is one reason we all love you. What? Who loves me? I asked. Everybody, she said. Oh, for heavens sake, I said. She looked at me expectantly but said nothing. Look, Im glad I get along with you and Cisco and Stoney and the crew, I mean I really like having friends and all, but really. She paused to think for a moment. May I ask you a question, Henry Baida? Sure, I answered. Did you have friends in high school? I thought. Not really. I did my homework and went to pool halls and bars, I guess. Bars are useful but not places to make long-term friends, she said. No pool-hall friends, Henry Baida? Well, no. The old guys didnt like me because I wouldnt hustle and the young guys didnt like me because I took their money. Whats this about the old guys, Henry Baida? You seem to me to form natural and easy-going relationships with senior citizens?

Yeah, they were fine, but they wanted to teach me the cons. We stopped and she looked at me with a frown. I thought for a few seconds about how to respond. They wanted to teach me how to tell a story to make a guy up his bet, like act like I wasnt as good as I was, to encourage the guy I was playing to bet more. Gambling tricks. How to hustle. That kind of stuff. For a lot of the cons you need a partner and I never wanted one of those. Seems dishonest to gang up on somebody. Besides I just wanted to shoot pool. Just look at the table. Make your bet and take your shot. No story, no partner. Again the aloneness, she said. I have seen your friend Donnie do things you describe. Donnie really wasnt my friend, although he was fun to have around. You couldnt trust him any further than you could spit a brick, but since Id recently been chided for noticing a fire-eyed zebra I let it go. Well, Donnie would do all of the things a gambler could think of to do if he had a partner he trusted, but Donnies not the trusting sort, I said, deliberatively. This gambling. I do not understand it, Henry Baida, she said. You cant explain gambling to people who dont gamble, so I didnt try. I shrugged. It seems to me that it may conflict with ones duty to be thrifty, she said, hugging her book more tightly for a second. Yeah, well, you either get it or you dont. Of those who do, some are good at it and some are not, I said. Do you understand it, Henry Baida? she asked. I thought. Not really. Ive had some success with it and I once could tell which bets I was likely to win and which I was likely to lose. Theres a touch to that part of it that I may have lost. But I never understood the why of it. For that matter I dont understand the why of quantum mechanics, but they keep telling me it works. Im better with Newton than with quantum, she said. It makes intuitive sense. It comports with perceptions and observations. I keep waiting to reach that point with quantum. Stop waiting. You wont, I said. She looked at me and frowned. No analogue, I said. Nobodys trying to describe physical reality with quantum. Sometimes the equations work out, and when they do they stick with them. But you dont need to understand. She clearly didnt like this, although she must have heard it many times before. Explain, Henry Baida? she said. I thought. So you seem to be a faithful Catholic, I said. I am, she said.

Can you explain the Trinity to me? I asked. I cannot, Henry Baida, she said. We are given to accept it on faith. Isnt the Trinity central to Catholic theology? I asked Father Tom says that it is, she said. And the fact that you dont understand it doesnt bother you? I would prefer it if I did, but the fact that I cannot is something that all priests seem to agree is not surprising. I decided at a young age that I trusted priests and so I take comfort in the fact that they tell me that all people are not intended to understand all things, she said. But we are considerably astray from our original point, Henry Baida? Okay. What was the original point? I asked. Your aloneness, she said. Yeah well. Im just solitary by nature, I said. Some people are. I must admit I cannot understand this, Henry Baida, although I love you, as all who know you do. I would not choose to be alone if I had an alternative. Living with you and Stoney and Michael and Cisco is the nicest thing that has ever happened to me. I am not alone with you? And I do not like being alone at any time and never have, Henry Baida. I did not realize I was alone until I was eleven? And I have been alone ever since, until I met you. And Stoney and Michael and Cisco. What happened when you were eleven? I asked. She frowned at an unpleasant memory. She stopped our slow walk right at the corner of Kirkland Hall, well away from the freshman quad. Without the light from the dorm room windows it was too dark to see anything but the general outline of her face. I had always wanted to be a Girl Scout, she said, in the still, chilly darkness. I loved the green uniforms, the three-fingered salute, the merit badges, the clubbiness, the having friends. But there wasnt a Girl Scout troop at our church and my mother wouldnt drive me to the ones in other towns. But then the mothers in the other class in my grade said they were organizing a troop for our school, and anyone who was interested could join. So of course I went to the first meeting and had such a good time, Henry Baida. They gave us mimeographed copies of the Girl Scout laws and told us when meetings would be and took our sizes for uniforms and told us Girl Scout Handbooks had been ordered and would be there in a few weeks and we had Lorna Doones and pink Hi-C and talked about our teachers and nobody seemed to be a popular girl or an odd girl, we were all just girls and I felt happier than I had ever been before in

my life. To be a part of something? To be part of a group! To be part of a club! It was wonderful. Here she paused for a few seconds but I got the feeling I didnt need to say anything to encourage her to continue. She would know I was listening. We stood there in the cold for a few more seconds while she thought. The next meeting was the following Tuesday, she continued, with a more somber tone of voice than I was used to from her. I went to the meeting just the same as the week before, all excited and happy, but the girls didnt seem to be acting the same to me. It was like we had popular girls and unpopular girls again, but I was the only unpopular girl. Mrs. Scott was handing out all the uniforms and making sure the troop had been paid for them but when I tried to give her the money my mother had put into the brown official Girl Scouts of America uniform money envelope Mrs. Scott said she didnt have a uniform for me and she was going to call my mother and explain why. It was all very confusing to me. The first meeting had been so much fun and the second meeting was how I always felt, only worse. Then that night while I was doing my homework the phone rang and my mother answered in the kitchen. She was making this awful moqueca fish soup my father likes so the house smelled unpleasant and stuffy and I could hear part of what she was saying and I knew it was about me so I went into the kitchen despite the smell as soon as my mother hung up and my mother was frowning at the phone and I asked my mother was that about Girl Scouts and she looked at me and scowled at mike something bad was going on that was all my fault. She had this idea that my father and I loved Alabama and made her live there even though she hated it. It wasnt trueDaddy was just stuck there and Iwell, I usually didnt feel like I fit in, but there was no way to change my mothers mind once shed made it up so I didnt ever try to talk to her about it. Then she said kind of angrily in Portuguese They wont have you, so I asked Who wont have me? Mom said Os americanos maldito.5 Beatriz went quiet again for a long time. The Girls Scouts didnt want me, she said, eventually. Mom said Mrs. Scott told her that the troop was for white girls only. I had never realized I was dark before. I mean, Henry Baida, I knew my skin was darker than many girls but was not aware it mattered. In that way, I mean. I could see her tilt her head up to look at the stars. It explained a lot, she finished. Im so sorry. You had nothing to do with it, my friend Henry. My mother said that Americans did not like us and that she wanted to move back to Brazil but my father wouldnt do it. She asked me for the uniform money back so I went back to my room where my school book bag was and got the brown Girl Scouts envelope with the uniform money and gave it back to her. Oh, Beatriz, thats just awful, I said.

I dont speak Portuguese but my guess at translation would be something like Those awful Americans.

Oh, Henry! It was! I was so sad! I went back to my bedroom and I cried and cried and cried. I had so wanted to be a Girl Scout. And I had been so happy in the meeting before. But they didnt want me. I was too different. Sweetheart. I like it that youre not like everyone else. How could anyone not? Oh, Henry. Youre so sweet, as always. But most people dont like whats different. They like whats the same. The same as them. Im not the same as anybody. Im dark-skinned but I never knew any black people until I came to college. And I have to say they all seem very nice. But I wasnt the same as anybody in Wadley. So Im not the same as anyone here. I dont know how. So there was no way for you to be a Girl Scout? Not exactly. Mrs. Grimes who lived down the street heard about what had happened to me and she had been Girl Scout leader for a long time and she knew what the new troop had done was bad and so she created a one-girl troop for me and we met once a week and I was making progress and had earned my Homemaking and Nature merit badges before she died. She gave me this. She held out her Girl Scout Handbook, then clutched it again to her breast. I couldnt see it, but I could see a faint reflection off of the Zip-Loc bag she kept it in. My eyes were tearing up and I was glad it was dark. The idea of sweet, beautiful, eccentric Beatriz, who never seemed to have wanted anything in her life except to belong, to have tasted that for an hour only to get tossed out because her skin was the wrong color fifteen short years before was easily the saddest thing I had ever heard. Oh, Henry, she said, sounding worried. Have I upset you? I couldnt see her eyes in the darkness, and hoped she couldnt see mine. No. Yes. Maybe. I dont know. I know how much you like scouting, I said. Many people suffer disappointments, Henry. In this I am like many others. I, um. I mean, I grew up among Southerners, I said. Yes? she said. I dont like it that they treated you like this. Oh, Henry Baida Thats so sweet of you? But I think the actual black people in South Alabama had a far harder time than I did. Nobody was actually mean to me. We had a nice house? Beatriz, they wouldnt let you into their Girl Scout troop because they thought you were too dark.

That is true, Henry, but when I was a little girl most of the black people I saw around Wadley didnt have shoes. They were hungry. They farmed with mules. People called them names. Not as much now? I wouldnt have expected Randolph County, Alabama to have been progressive about race relations in 1965, but Id always thought of Southern ladies as priding themselves on their manners. My mother was not at all Southern, and Id noticed reactions in the women in Mississippi and Florida and Tennessee. They disapproved of her complete lack of gentility. Id also watched the news when Bull Connor set the dogs on the marchers in Birmingham, and that was part of the reason I didnt think of myself as particularly Southernwhy work so hard and inflict so much pain to preserve something that was never right in the first place? I knew that things had been bad. I remember the chill I had gotten a few years before when I realized I was driving over the Edmund Pettis Bridge. When Id been on the road Id always avoided Selma. But there was something so ineffably sad about poor Beatriz sitting at home alone while the group she so needed to belong to met a few blocks away. It was more than sad, it was mean. Nobody had cared about poor Beatriz going from feeling awkward and odd to feeling like shed finally fit in just where she wanted overnight to be to being shunned. And it was the grown-ups who made the girls act that way, taught them to exclude. She started walking again in the darkness, slowly, and I followed without saying anything. I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted to give her a hug. I wanted to stop crying. I wanted for everything to have been different for her. We were quiet until we got to the elevator in our dorm and she looked at me for the first time in the light. Oh, Henry! Poor Henry! I have upset you! Im so sorry! Im fine, sweetheart, I said. I just feel so bad that you were treated that way. You deserved so much better. We got onto the elevator and I pressed the button for our floor. Henry Baida, it is truly and deeply touching that you feel such empathy for me. For the younger me. But none of this was your doing. You have done nothing wrong. I thought about that for a second. Its more complicated than that, I said as the elevator doors opened on the eighth floor. The door to our suite was unlocked and open even though no one seemed to be present. The door to her room was directly across the interior hall from mine and we got there in a few steps. I dont think it is more complicated than that, Henry Baida. You are a good person. You like to think of yourself as a cruel dude but youre not. A what? I asked.

A cruel dude. Its from a song. Dont know it. Well, youre not one anyway? She came closer to me than she generally did, placed her hands on my shoulders and stood on tip-toe to kiss me on the cheek. She smiled. Thank you, Henry Baida, she said, then opened her door, waved good night, and closed the door behind her. I unlocked my own door, flipped on the lights and sat on the corner of my bed, remembering something from my own childhood. I sat there glumly for a few minutes, not even taking off my jacket, then Cisco appeared, headed for his own room. He said hi as he passed and glanced through the door at me then stopped suddenly. You okay, man? he asked. Sure. Why? I asked. Cause you look like youve been crying. Not your style, he said. Im okay, I said. I was just thinking about something that happened when I was a kid. Hit me, he said, leaning against the door jamb. I shrugged. I wasnt sure it was going to be interesting to anyone else. Okay. Well, when I was in the third grade my Uncle Norman died. Mom was stateside for some reason and needed to go to the funeral in Birmingham. My dad was in Viet Nam and my sister was in high school. I think Mom would have left me with my sister but Mom needed the car to drive to Birmingham. So my sister went to stay with a friend for a few days and Mom took me with her to Alabama. When we got there Mom decided I needed a haircut. Id never liked getting haircuts and Mom had never minded letting me keep it kind of long but that was right about the time the Beatles showed up on TV and Mom didnt want her sisters to think she was letting me turn into one of those. So the night we got there she took me to this little three-chair barber shop in Birmingham just before dark. It turns dark early in Birmingham in the winter. Memorable haircut? Cisco asked. He had a pretty short attention span. Not exactly, I said. It was kind of hard to come to the point. Cisco shifted his feet a little. When we came out it was almost dark, like I said, I said. I remember my head seemed cold because my hair was shorter and the barber had put some sweetsmelling stuff on my hair. Mom and I walked out of the barber shop towards her car and passed this narrow alleyway that ran between the barber shop and this hardware store. Or maybe a feed store. Some kind of big red brick store. Cisco lit a cigarette, held up a

finger to request a brief pause, then went to his room to get an ashtray. He returned and repositioned himself against the door jamb, Marlboro in his right hand, small smoked glass ashtray in his left. He looked at me expectantly. Okay, I said, So in the alley, close to the store, was a Birmingham motorcycle cop. He said something cordial to my mom, but shes not good at that exchanging pleasantries deal. Mom also didnt seem happy to see him and seemed to want to keep moving but his presence there surprised me and I stopped to look at him for a second. My mom tried to tug me along, but I was kind of stopped. I could hear Stoney and Michael show up in the living room. They seemed to pause there in conversation. If Cisco heard them it didnt register. And? Cisco asked. He may have been a little impatient but was also perhaps aware that something I thought significant must have happened with the cop. So the motorcycle cop looked at me then smiled at my mom and said Im just waiting for some nigger to run that red light sos I can give im a ticket.6 Man, that kind of thing happened all the time back then, Cisco said. There were bad cops in Atlanta, too. Yeah, there were bad people all over. Heres the thing. At the time my question to my mom was Why would he be just looking for niggers? Shouldnt he be giving tickets to everyone who runs the red light? Yeah, bud. Dont be hard on yourself, man. Why not? If Im not hard on myself, whos going to be? Certainly not Beatriz. I came close to crying again. Stoney and Michael showed up behind Cisco. Michael took one look at me and came right over to sit next to me on the bed. Whats wrong, sweetheart? he asked. I wasnt sure how to answer. I kind of spread my hands without saying anything. How to explain this? If I may, said Cisco, taking a drag from his cigarette and whistling the exhaled smoke into the hall in an attempt to keep it out of my room. It was nice of him to try, but smokers really dont understand the effect they have on their surroundings. Or they didnt back then. Go ahead, I said. Henry and I grew up in the South. When he was a child a Birmingham policeman told Henry that he was selectively enforcing the law against only blacks, using a racial epithet in the process. Henry may think it should have seemed worse to him at the time than it did.
6

If anyones ever curious about whether anything in this book is autobiographical, that is the only sentence in the entire book that was ever spoken in the authors presence. It was said by a Birmingham policeman in an alley near a barber shop in 1963. Everything else is made up. True, the cylindrical volume problem in Chapter 26 was inspired by Car Talk on NPR, but I dont think I quoted Tom or Ray.

I thought I heard the n-word, said Stoney, lighting a cigarette off of a Mrs. W.type full-sized Zippo. He looked around for an ashtray, spotted Ciscos, and tapped his Winston on it sociably. Howd I do? Cisco asked me. Not bad, but I began. Man, you just cant be too hard on yourself about this stuff, Cisco said. Those were different days. We were raised in a particular way, in a particular place. From what I saw on TV Atlanta may have been a little better than Birmingham, but there were things we just didnt notice back them. Should we have noticed them? Sure. But I think we can cut ourselves a little slack for being kids in a chaotic time. Hell, I didnt even realize I was a liberal until earlier this year. What brought it on? asked Stoney. Oh, I was dating this girl named Jessie. Gorgeous. Melissa pretty. Great in the sack. But she was prejudiced. She knew somebody I happen to like and she wasnt keen on her because ofwell, reasons I considered bigoted. So I dumped her and have been dating liberals ever since. No matter how beautiful, if shes not a Democrat, she doesnt get a second look. Well, maybe a look, but thats about it. Hows that working out? asked Stoney, tapping his ash into the ashtray. Outstanding, said Cisco, stubbing out his butt into the ashtray, but keeping it handy for Stoney. How so? asked Michael. The Democrats are just as good-looking, they dont wear makeup or padded bras so theres less guesswork, and they all give killer blow-jobs. It really has been eyeopening. Back to Henry, said Michael. Of course, said Cisco. He shook out another Marlboro, and Stoney offered him a light from his extra-large Zippo. Dont take this the wrong way, Henry, but have you been crying? Michael asked. A bit, I said. Explain, said Stoney.

Beatriz and I had dinner at the Elliston Place deal, and on the walk back she said something that made me think about the racial stuff thats been going on all around me all my life and I just never noticed. The cop story? Cisco asked. Yes, I said. But you didnt do anything wrong, Cisco said. You were a child who saw an adult planning to do something wrong. Even if you understood what he was doing, amigo, you were ten. What could you have done? Okay, so, when I sat down on this bed and I remembered that story I was thinking of how tough things were back then and how this was an example of how things used to be. But then it occurred to me that it had never occurred to me that I used the word nigger. Never once. Not until tonight. Look, man, everybody used that word back then, Cisco said. You ever use it? I asked Stoney. No, never, he said. Sorry, pal, he said to Cisco. You? I asked Michael. No. Of course not, he answered. And I can place a reasonably informed wager that Beatriz has not, so Cisco, you and I are the people nearby who have used that word, I said. Point taken, said Cisco. Being liberal is a bitch. Its worth it, but its a bitch. I dont like being part of the problem, I said. Yeah, we have to do better, said Cisco. And we probably both went to sleep that night thinking we would. After theyd gone to bed I realized Id completely forgotten about the zebra. Just as well.