“All right, let’s start with the obvious here,” Mr. Armstrong said. So, not blowing over. “The Confederacy and the United States were opposing sides in a war.”
Still quiet. Among our kind there is stuff not talked about, and stuff not done, including insulting people straight to their faces. We knew of words that were not proper-noun capital Black getting used, we definitely heard those, from older guys or parents or whoever, people ticked off over something they’d never met firsthand and knew nothing about. No real person. Which to us in that parking lot, Mr. Armstrong was. We’d all had him in class or as guidance counselor steering us through the juvenile justice system, and nobody I knew disliked the man. I kept my eyes on the bad-faced pumpkins, wondering for the thousandth time how hard is it to understand, you put the eyes halfway down the face, not the top? Another bus pulled up and people ducked their heads and got on, probably including a few that didn’t take that bus.
“People,” Mr. Armstrong finally kind of yelled, like he did whenever we were ignorant in class. “Are you following me here? A war. Opposite sides. Flying both those flags at once makes no sense. It’s like rooting for the Generals and the Abingdon Falcons in the same game.”
Whoah. We were all like, Crap. Because that’s unthinkable.
Some guys started mumbling heritage and nothing personal, and Mr. Armstrong took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking as usual somewhere between interested and flat-out flummoxed. “Whose history are we talking about?” he asked. “Because Virginia voted to join the Confederacy, that’s true. To support the plantation owners. But the people here in this county were not represented in that vote.”
Nobody wanted to tangle with him. Of all of us still out there that hadn’t yet got on buses or edged back into the building, I’m going to say not one person would have taken up a rifle for any plantation fat cats. We were actually glad of what he told us, that the mountain people of Virginia rounded up their own militias to try and fight on the other team, Union. He said we should feel free to pass on this info to certain guys, and we shook our heads like, Those assholes, regardless some of those assholes being brothers or friends or dads. Because that was Mr. Armstrong. Even if you didn’t necessarily want to, you would end up on his side.
Melungeon turns out to be another one of those words. Invented for hating on certain people until they turned it around and said, Screw you, I’m taking this. These people were mixed, all the colors plus Cherokee and also Portuguese, which used to be its own thing, not white. The reason of them getting mixed was that in pioneer days Lee County was like now, with nobody having a pot to piss in. These folks being poor as dirt just had a good time and ended up with the all-colored babies. If they went anywhere else, these kids got the hate word, melungeon, which Mr. Dick said is some other language for mixed-up piece of shit.
Mr. Dick got into my Backgrounds project in a big way. It would have taken three or more kites to hold everything he wrote down. He explained how in those times a person would get called the n-word if they were even the smallest tad of not-white. Meaning they couldn’t vote, have their own farm, etc. So these mixed-ups that everybody called melungeon went to the courthouse and said okay, that’s what I am. Write it down. (Proper noun, capital M.) The courthouse people probably studied on it but couldn’t find a thing in their books to say a Melungeon couldn’t do this or that, so. Nice trick.
Those were my people. Mr. Dick and Miss Betsy’s father moved away from here to find Jesus, but mainly to stop being one of these people. If his kids ever wondered about aunts or cousins, they’d get leathered for asking. They never heard the word Melungeon. But they still got wind of these dark-skinned, green-eyed people back in Virginia. My dad grew up asking if it was true. At the time he ran off, he and Miss Betsy were hurt at each other so not speaking. She never knew if he’d made it back here till he wrote the letter saying he was in Lee County with a girl, fixing to have a baby. The little green-eyed Copperhead he’d never see.
Mr. Dick wrote all this up and gave it to me in an envelope and said to read it later, by myself. And I’ve never been one to get choked up or weepy, even as a small kid. But after I read about my people and my dad, I shoved my face in the pillow and cried like a baby.
Angus said I’d better start a little notebook on my girlfriends, to keep them all straight. This was just Angus being Angus, not mad, more like she’s proud of my success. I never had that many at one time, or for long. To be honest, the most interesting female type of person in my life right then was Ms. Annie, art teacher, obviously out of the girlfriend running. Also I might have been pretty far gone for Linda Larkins, the big-sister math genius and killer flirt from the homework club, but ditto, not a real thing. She was seventeen.
As far as these others that actually liked me, they kept me busy. We were too young yet to do anything in cars like normal kids, but where there’s a will there’s a couch and blankets or my bedroom, if everybody else in the house was asleep. Study sessions that ran long. It got to where if I wasn’t doing something with a girl, I was thinking about doing something with a girl. My body went on wishing even if I managed to get the brain on something else. Exactly like it does if you’re hungry. I’d been a no-toucher person for a lot of years. I vaguely recalled Mom being a big hugger, but then came Stoner, and family life turned into a whole other kind of contact sport. This skin-on-skin was all new. I did get nerves over not knowing what I was doing or what was allowed, these middle school girls being dead set against going all the way, like they’d made a girlwide agreement. But I knew where all the bases were now. I got tutored.
Once in the blue moon I’d go with the Peggots to see Emmy, but over and out on that onetime romance. Maggot swore she was dating Hammer Kelly now, which she denied. She made fun of Hammer’s countrified haircut, and said the only person in love with him was Mr. Peg, that took him hunting. So Hammer was not the problem, Emmy was just not that hot on me anymore. I was hurt at first and then wasn’t, because like they say, plenty of fish in the sea. Jump in there wearing your football jersey to school on a Friday and my Lord, it’s like that Bible miracle. Fishes coming out of everywhere.
For the record, gifteds can and do play football. Some of the guys found me out, but they didn’t give me that much grief over it. I never missed a practice. These guys were solid, future Generals all. Cush Polk for one, our JV quarterback, decent as milk, a preacher’s kid from way the hell over by Ewing. Tall, blond, actual red cheeks, the type that still said “Yes ma’am” to teachers. He claimed he got his speed from being youngest in a family of nine, and his mom only ever cooked for eight. And Turp Trussell for another, that once drank a shot of turpentine for purposes that remain unclear. Big clown, built like a brick shithouse, boldness of a bull in rut. Brain of a deer tick, but that’s not something to hold against a running back.