—What did the players say? I asked, setting the box on my desk.
He explained that they first learned I was gone when they walked into the locker room after meetings. My locker had been cleaned out by Cyrus Pyle; even my nameplate was gone. Zeller’s broken-ankle explanation spread quickly, but this was a lie designed for the wider world, not the team, and nobody bought it. Instead they replaced this lie with their own lies, such as that I’d run away from King with my faggot boyfriend; that I’d killed myself by drowning in the cold pool; that I’d extorted Coach Zeller for not only my scholarship but also an exorbitant amount of hush money. Down at practice, the coaches were all in strange, sour moods. Coach Hightower one moment would be watching the leaves on the trees surrounding the fields, and the next slamming his binder against Chase’s helmet. Reshawn’s favorite reaction was Coach Zeller’s: you wouldn’t have believed the euphoric man from the Notre Dame game was the same one who’d screamed himself pink today.
Reshawn said all of this in what I can only call a vicarious tone of voice. When he finished, I said, apologetically:
—You’ve got what I want, and I got what you want.
He nodded, having clearly already thought this. He went to his desk and began switching the textbooks in his book bag for a different set.
—For now, he said. But if you can get off this fucking team, I can too. I just have to figure out how.
He left for the library, and I climbed back into bed. I thought about how my helmet and shoulder pads, wristbands and gloves, belt, hip pads, knee pads, thigh pads, and tail pad, my four pairs of shoes, my ankle and knee socks, my T-shirts and lifting shorts and girdle—how they all must have been returned to the equipment room to be washed before being sent back into general circulation.
I peered out of the iron-framed window that stood next to my bed, looking at the quad below. I spotted Reshawn. He exited Mennee Hall and turned left, toward the library. His eyes were down, his heavy backpack slung over his shoulder, and he paid no mind to the two students walking in the opposite direction who watched him pass. He climbed a short flight of stone steps into a dark archway, disappearing.
I looked right, toward the spotlighted chapel and the horseshoe-shaped campus shuttle stop in front of it. Thao would be coming from that direction.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lisa Williams, the New Poetry & Prose Series editor, never balked at the idea that a novel about football could be a serious work of fiction, and for this I will be forever in her debt. Ann Marlowe’s stress tests of every sentence made her title of copy editor seem inadequate indeed. And Patrick O’Dowd, David Cobb, Ashley Runyon, Jackie Wilson, and the rest of the folks at the University Press of Kentucky pooled their considerable talents to get my book to readers.
Kathy Daneman’s keen intelligence and genuine enthusiasm made the publicity process a joy.
I find I have a healthy list of people to thank for favors done. Kyle Knight assured me I wasn’t making too much of an ass of myself; Katie Freeman provided support during a particularly lonesome stretch; Adam Eaglin, who despite not being my agent generously gave important agently direction; Deni Ellis Béchard’s comments significantly improved the prologue. And the Sewanee Writers’ Conference allowed me to meet authors whose companionship will be a balm (and their talents a spur) for years to come.
Then there are the people who convinced a fanatical jock he was more than the sum of his body parts: Daniel McMahon, who introduced me to Ellison, Eliot, and Cervantes; Sherryl Broverman, whose urgent social consciousness I will always strive, and fail, to match; Hap Zarzour, who understood that something was wrong; Donna Hall, who made it clear I wasn’t that wrong thing; the Duke teammates I let down and didn’t punish me for it.
I am rich in family, blood relations and otherwise, and these acknowledgments would be endless if I described each person’s importance to me. So a simple, strong thank you to Cindi Fla-hive-Sobel, Scott Sobel, Colin Runge, Sara Haas-Runge, Conor Runge, Holly Runge, Kylie Sobel-Kline, Marc Kline, Killian Sobel, Katie Flahive, Catherine Darby, Leonard Darby, Andy Stager, Josh Rickman.
Again, this book is dedicated to Seyward Darby, who at parties would never allow me to call myself anything other than a writer.
A Note on the Text
Carmichael Stewart King is based on George Moses Horton (1797?–1883?). Horton was born a slave in Northampton County, North Carolina. As a boy he taught himself to read, and so prodigious was his facility with language that he soon could compose original hymn stanzas in his head. In his twenties, he earned both money and renown on the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus for his ability to extemporize acrostic love poems for college students. With the help of various benefactors, he learned to write and started publishing his work, and by 1865 he had authored three books of verse that contain many poems of devastating beauty. He stopped publishing poetry after moving north at the end of the Civil War, a silence that would continue for the remainder of his life.
While the details and shape of Horton’s journey differ in crucial ways from my character’s, I should note that the research documents I used for my fictional purposes were found on the website of UNC’s Documenting the American South initiative, available at https://docsouth.unc.edu/.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY
NEW POETRY AND PROSE SERIES
This series features books of contemporary poetry and fiction that exhibit a profound attention to language, strong imagination, formal inventiveness, and awareness of one’s literary roots.
SERIES EDITOR: Lisa Williams
ADVISORY BOARD: Camille Dungy, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Silas House, Davis McCombs, and Roger Reeves
Sponsored by Centre College
