like Philippe and Antoine had to run a gauntlet, an actual gauntlet! American black boys spotted them immediately and beat them up on the way to school and on the way home. Beat them up! More than once Philippe had come home with welts on his face, contusions. Lantier was determined to step in and do something about it. Philippe begged him not to—begged him! It would only make things worse, Papa. Then he’d really get it. So all the Haitian boys did the same thing. They tried to turn themselves as American black as they could… the clothes, the baggy jeans, the boxer shorts showing… the talk, yo, bro, ho, ain’t, ain’no, homey, mo’vucker, ca’zucca. And now look at Philippe. He had black hair as straight as Ghislaine’s. Whatever he did with it, it would be better than what he did with it now… which was wear it cut about three inches long all over and frizz it to make it look Neg.
With all these things running through his head, Lantier didn’t realize how long his eyes were fixed upon his son’s face… with disappointment, with the resentful feeling that Philippe was in some way betraying him.
The sudden silence made the moment intense.
Philippe was now staring back into Lantier’s face not with mere resentment but with insolence, as Lantier saw it. Antoine no longer looked at him with live hatred, however. He seemed mainly to feel himself backed up in somebody else’s toilet. His eyeballs rolled upward for an instant. He seemed to be looking for some white-robed little person with wings who would fly over and wave a wand and make him disappear.
It had turned into a Mexican standoff. Here are the enemies staring daggers at each other without moving a muscle or making a sound. Finally…
“An nou soti la!” Philippe said in Creole to Antoine with his loudest, deepest baritone or, rather, bariteen gang voice (“Let’s get outta here”).
Both turned their backs upon Lantier without another word and walked across the kitchen doing the pimp roll… and disappeared out the side door.
Lantier was left speechless in the doorway of his little office. He turned back to his desk and stared at Ghislaine. What was to be done? Why on earth would an essentially bright, handsome, light-skinned Haitian, directly related to the de Lantiers of Normandy, like your brother, want to turn himself into an American Neg? Those too-big baggy pants, for example… the Neg criminals wore them in jail. The jailers weren’t about to go to the trouble of measuring an inmate before giving him clothes. They just gave them clothes that were obviously big enough, which meant they were always too big. The little Negs on the street wore them because they idealized the big Negs in jail. They were their heroes. They were baaaaad. They were fearless. They terrified the American whites and the Cubans. But if it were just the stupid clothes and the ignorant hip-hop music, and the vile Black English, which be primitive to the max, man, that would be one thing. But Haitian boys like your brother imitated stupid, ignorant Neg attitudes, too. That was the real problem. The Negs thought only “pussies” raised their hands in class during class discussions or studied hard for tests or cared about grades or little things like being courteous to teachers. Haitian boys didn’t want to be pussies, either, for God’s sake!—and so they began treating school like a pussy inconvenience, too. And now Philippe regresses from French to Creole. You heard him!—but you’re lucky. You don’t speak it, and you don’t have to bother understanding it… whereas I’m not so lucky. I understand Creole. I have to teach the damned language. What is to be done when it’s time for your brother to go to college? No college will want him, and he won’t want no college. Nome sayin’, man?
After about a half hour of this, Lantier realized that he and Ghislaine weren’t talking about Philippe—because Ghislaine never got a word in about anything. He was just using her ears as a couple of receptacles into which he could pour his agony and the helplessness he felt… This endless soliloquy of disappointment would not solve anything. It would only depress Ghislaine and make her lose respect for him. An axiom popped into his head: Parents should never confess anything to their children… zero! nothing whatsoever!
But he couldn’t avoid confessing to himself… in a rising tide of guilt. ::::::What is Philippe’s problem? It’s so