CALIFORNIA

The black guy lived just outside town. I don't remember his name, but he was from California.

"I never imagined I'd end up in a trailer in Arkansas," he said, once, "but that's love."

He was living with my roommate's sister. She was a pretty girl, thin and snotty with purposefully ugly hair, the kind of girl you'd expect to be with a jock or a drug dealer.

"Sometimes," he said, once, "I feel like black girls are looking at me like I'm betraying them or something. But they're sore losers."

The black guy walked into town every so often to smoke pot with my roommate and philosophize. It was my first apartment, and I didn't know any better than to let them smoke pot on the couch. I didn't smoke it. I was getting ready to move, getting ready to give it up and start college and get the hell out. But if I sat with them long enough, I'd get a residual buzz from the secondhand smoke.

"You don't find pure black people anymore," the black guy said, once, "unless they're from Africa. I mean, come on, if you saw this pretty little colored girl bending over the cotton, you'd take her to the barn for a quick one. I would."

"I wouldn't own slaves," I said.

"Sure you would, everybody did, back then. If you were raised in that environment, you'd have done what everyone else did."

"I understand what you're saying, and I think it definitely happened," I said, "but I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have owned slaves. Lots of people didn't own slaves. Mostly, it was rich folks; poor people couldn't afford it. And I wouldn't have done what everyone else did," I added. "I never have."

He looked annoyed and my roommate, Keebler, passed him a joint.



They were my first interracial couple, just as Keebler's cousin had been the first gay person I'd really known. I had been raised Baptist, taught to condemn homosexuality, but Keebler's cousin was a nice girl, and I preferred her company to any preacher's. I had also been raised not to approve of interracial couples, but I liked the black guy. He worked at a nursing home, which I respected. He was funny and more intelligent than anyone else I knew, and I was starved for intelligent conversation, even if he tended to make things awkward.

The first time I met the black guy was when he knocked on the door, asking for Keebler.

"He isn't home, but he should be soon. You want to wait?" I asked. I was used to Keebler's friends hanging out, and I didn't have a lot of my own.

"You sure you want to let a strange black man in your home?" he asked.

"Okay, leave your guns outside," I joked.

"I'm serious," he said. "This is your home, you have to treat it respectfully, or no one else will."

"That's true," I said because I couldn't think of anything else.

He offered his hand and introduced himself. He came in and sat in what would become his spot in the middle of the couch and started talking. Usually, I left Keebler's friends sitting while I went back to sleep in my room. I was working two full time jobs, mostly just trying to fill in the hours. Most of the stuff in the apartment wasn't mine so I didn't really care if it was stolen or damaged. But the black guy was different. He seemed to know things, to have a perspective the other stoners lacked. Part of it may have been that he was black; this was Arkansas, where many areas had higher black populations than white, but we lived in Searcy, a Church of Christ community in central Arkansas which was effectively segregated so that most of the blacks lived in a smaller suburb-like area called Kensett just south of Searcy proper. I will admit, I had been raised around a lot of black people, even if I was raised by backwards people who looked down on them, and it made me nervous to be in too white of an area, so he did make me feel more comfortable in that respect. Part of it was that he wasn't from there.

"Black people here aren't like black people in California," he said, once, "they're lazy. They put up with too much."

Still uneasy with my newly shed racist preconceptions, it was a conversation I didn't want to have, but he never let things like that go.

"You're talking about generations of oppression, though," I said. "An entire societal structure holding people back."

He had a way of controlling the argument, so that you ended up on whichever side he wanted you to be on. I didn't want to be the defender of blacks in the south. It was something I felt I wasn't qualified to speak to, and yet there I was.

"In California, we'd never put up with the way people are treated, here," he continued. "We'd riot. Like Watts."

"What about Selma? Or the massacre at Elaine? They don't have the Klan in California."

He looked at me for a long moment as though sizing me up. "What's it like, being in the Klan? You ever lynch a nigger?"

I blushed hard. "I'm not in the klan," I said.

"I'm not saying you are. You wouldn't want to accuse me of being uppity," he said.

It made me so mad I could hardly speak. "I'm not in no fucking klan," I said. "If I was, what would you be doing here, in my house?" It wasn't what I wanted to say, but it was the best I could manage.

He smiled real wide and started laughing. "I'm just fucking with you," he said. "You're all right. I know you're better than some."



A month or so after he started coming over, somebody broke in and stole Keebler's stash. The black guy wasn't the only one Keebler smoked with, but suspicion fell on him first.

"What'd he do, walk over here, break in, and walk back?" I asked.

"Sure. Maybe he got a taxi," Keebler said. "I'm gonna talk to Lisa." Lisa was his sister.

"What about the crippled girl?" I asked.

The crippled girl lived a couple apartments over with her boyfriend. About a month after we'd moved in, she'd knocked on our door, saying, "I thought I smelled pot in here."

She could walk, but her hips weren't right, so it was difficult. She and her boyfriend came over almost every day. They sat on the loveseat by the door watching Keebler explain his method of rolling joints (Keebler became didactic when he was high) and smoking his pot. Their eyes were greedy, and they watched Keebler's every move. Dollars to donuts, they did it, I thought, not the black guy. That was too easy. It would've proved too many people right.

Pretty soon after that another guy moved in. He worked at Wendy's. Keebler and I worked at a local fast food place downtown. The guy had been kicked out of his dorm at the religious college for smoking pot. He laid on the loveseat all day, and eventually lost his job because he never showed up.

It was too much for me. I left soon after that and heard that the guy on the couch broke into Keebler's safe, which he'd bought to hold his stash. Keebler told the guy's mom, a ballsy move, I thought, and got his money back.

Later, I saw the black guy walking downtown. I pulled over and offered him a ride, but he declined.

"I can make my own way," he said. I figured Keebler had talked to his sister. I wanted to tell the black guy it wasn't me, I didn't think he'd done it. After the break in, the crippled girl and her boyfriend hadn't come back over for a couple weeks, which spelled guilty to me. I wanted to tell the black guy I wasn't like that, not anymore, but he was walking away, so I let him go.

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Tag: Cortney Bledsoe