Call Me by My Name by John Ed Bradley

Sure enough, she’d sprayed perfume on the construction paper and made it smell like something from the garden.
    Peonies, I supposed.
    That was Angie for you.

    At night, when he was tired and in a bad mood, Pops would ask Angie and me how the experiment was going. His cynicism didn’t merit an answer, but we gave him a couple, anyway.
    â€œGreat,” Angie said.
    â€œVery well,” I replied.
    But the truth was quite a bit different. Most of the white students hadn’t let themselves get to know the black kids, and the same could be said of many of the black kids—they had few white friends.
    I’d hoped that white students at the new private schools in town would be returning in droves after reconsidering their decisions to break from the public system, but this wasn’t happening. Instead whites continued to transfer out of our school. And now there were more black students than white ones; the 50–50 split had become a 60–40 split. When you walked down the halls between classes, you understood which group was the true minority.
    â€œThey’re everywhere,” I heard Freddie Sanders complain one day. “You can’t even have lunch without one of them coming over and trying to sit at your table.”
    â€œShut up,” I told him.
    My priority was the football team, so I mourned the siphoning of talent. Add players from the other schools in town and we likely would’ve had a dominant football program. Instead we had the smallest enrollment in our district. We also were its biggest loser.
    One night after practice I returned home and found Pops sitting at the kitchen table with the local paper spread out in front of him. He pointed. “Read this first, then you can eat,” he said. “Mama, get Rodney a glass of water.”
    It was a story about a lawsuit filed against the school board by one of our assistant basketball coaches, Joshua Dupre, a black man. His complaint said that the basketball team counted sixteen players, all but four of them black, and yet it had a white head coach, Robbie Brown, who’d unfairly been named to the position by the board. Furthermore, Coach Dupre said he’d been a successful head coach at J. S. Clark for nearly twenty years, while his twenty-five-year-old boss had only four years of coaching experience.
    The year before, I’d played for these coaches and thought they liked each other. At practice and in games, Coach Dupre had seemed dedicated to Coach Brown and content in his subordinate role. But all along, I understood now, Coach Dupre had believed he deserved to be in charge and would’ve been if not for his race.
    After I finished reading the story, Pops rapped his knuckles against the table. “It took us two hundred and fifty some-odd years to get to this point and now they want it all overnight,” he said.
    â€œBut you can understand why, can’t you?” I told him. “Wouldn’t you want it overnight if you had to wait that long?”
    He shook his head. “Good lord, boy, whose side are you on?”
    At school our classes were now called advanced instead of top group, and they still were mostly white, even though they included more college-bound black kids. Beginning with homeroom, Tater had the same schedule as Angie and me. We always sat on the last row of desks on the right side of the room—Angie first then Tater and me behind her, in that order. Patrice Jolivette, peeking her head in the door one day, laughed and said we looked like an “ass-backward Oreo cookie.”

    The legend of Tater Henry began when we played New Iberia at Donald Gardner Stadium before a crowd of a few hundred, mostly visiting fans. It was cold that Halloween Eve night, and we were 1–7 on the year, the second worst team in the district and only one win better than Lafayette Northside, which we’d needed an overtime miracle to beat.
    Our team colors were the colors of the season,