wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother’s face.
The next name was Martin Luther King Jr. I had never seen his face
before, or heard his name, and it was several minutes before I
understood that Dr. Kimball didn’t mean Martin Luther, who I had
heard of. It took several more minutes for me to connect the name with
the image on the screen—of a dark-skinned man standing in front of a
white marble temple and surrounded by a vast crowd. I had only just
understood who he was and why he was speaking when I was told he
had been murdered. I was still ignorant enough to be surprised.
—“OUR NIGGER’S BACK!”
I don’t know what Shawn saw on my face—whether it was shock,
anger or a vacant expression. Whatever it was, he was delighted by it.
He’d found a vulnerability, a tender spot. It was too late to feign
indifference.
“Don’t call me that,” I said. “You don’t know what it means.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “You’ve got black all over your face, like a
nigger!”
For the rest of the afternoon—for the rest of the summer—I was
Nigger. I’d answered to it a thousand times before with indifference. If
anything, I’d been amused and thought Shawn was clever. Now it
made me want to gag him. Or sit him down with a history book, as long
as it wasn’t the one Dad still kept in the living room, under the framed
copy of the Constitution.
I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant
it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But
far from fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he
said it—“Hey Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I
returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched
human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of
Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my
mind every time Shawn shouted, “Nigger, move to the next row.” I saw
their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that
summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp
something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone
had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the