While the strength and conditioning coaches kept track of each runner’s time, punching their stopwatches once we collapsed across the finish line, the rest of the coaches were again standing behind glass—this time a long window that looked into the room from the second-floor hallway. Coach Hightower nodded to signal his satisfaction with my performance, but the coach I was monitoring closely this morning was Coach Zeller. I held out hope the room was too chaotic for him to notice a single player missing, but that wasn’t likely when the absent player was the most important on the whole damn team.
After Devonté led us in the team cheer, Coach Zeller stepped inside the Terrarium to ask me in front of everybody:
—Miles, where’s your roommate?
—Not back yet, Coach.
—Back? From what?
—He went on a research trip with his professor.
—A research trip.
No interrogative edge, no question mark. It’s like I’d handed my coach a dead pigeon and told him it was a live ostrich.
—Yes sir, I said, tense. He went to Savannah.
—He back today? —Yes sir.
—When you see him, tell him he’s got a stadium at six tomorrow mornin’.
I showered and crossed West Campus to the English Department. What had passed for winter in Blenheim was already in retreat. There was a sweet dampness in the air, and the oak branches on the main quad were knuckled with buds. I spotted Reshawn and Jamie approaching the English building from a different direction, each holding a coffee cup.
—The essay’s real, Reshawn said in a rush, not giving me a chance to speak. It was—God, you should have come with us…. So there’s this gap in what we know about CSK. He started publishing poems in the 1850s, but then around ‘57 the publications stopped, and there was nothing more until the ‘70s. We knew the war accounted for part of that, but not everything. The essay in the newspaper fills in the rest of the time.
The three of us walked into the English building.
—There was a young woman who lived in Blenheim, Mary Anne Wilmton. Her husband was a Triune professor, and they’d moved from Boston a year before CSK started publishing. Wilmton came from a family of abolitionists. She was more moderate, but still uncomfortable with the South. So she reads CSK’s poems in the paper and seeks him out, and together they come up with a plan to publish a collection of his poetry, thinking they could use the subscription money to buy CSK’s freedom. CSK starts composing at this amazing clip, thirty poems a week, with Wilmton transcribing, and they choose the best for the collection. Wilmton uses her network up north to sell subscriptions, and it’s a success. By 1857 it looks like CSK can purchase his freedom.
—That’s great, I said, dully.
—Jonathan King had died a few years earlier, Reshawn continued, and Jedediah inherited his slaves. By now Jedediah’s famous for giving secessionist sermons around the state, and when CSK approaches him and says he wants to buy his freedom, King is furious. It would be humiliating if people learned the preacher promoting the dominance of the white race had been tricked by his own property. So King refuses to free CSK, saying the money CSK and Wilmton earned with subscriptions didn’t account for all the time CSK had spent composing his poems. King says that that time equated to lost work hours that needed to be paid for, too. CSK could have just sold more subscriptions and paid off the extra money after another year, but to prevent that, Jedediah put him to work in the fields. CSK had spent his whole life doing indoor work, and going out to the fields almost killed him. He thought he could at least keep composing poetry, but when King caught him, he whipped him and said he’d kill him if it ever happened again. CSK returned to where he started, composing poems in his head, and he was still in Blenheim when the Union Army arrived in 1865. When Jedediah returned from the war and took over his father’s tobacco business, CSK traveled north with a regiment to Trenton, where he started composing again.
We were standing outside the classroom. Reshawn was beaming.
—Zeller says you have a stadium tomorrow, I said.
—A what? Jamie asked.
—Nothing, Reshawn told her. Just football bullshit.
I could see that Jamie didn’t like being put off, but she dropped it.
Spring ball started Friday, initiating four weeks of practices that would be capped by an intrasquad scrimmage called the Purple and Gold Game. Traditionally that scrimmage was even more sparsely attended than our regular-season contests, to the point where only our parents would be in the stands, plus maybe a few stray sunbathers. But this year Mr. McGerrin led a group of rich alums calling themselves the Crown Committee in sponsoring an all-out public relations campaign to boost attendance and more generally start regenerating King Football’s fan base. A new AM radio show called “Talk to the Throne” was launched, and for two hours every week you could listen to Coach Zeller take calls about King Football and talk shop with guests about the coming season. Our stadium received a badly needed coat of whitewash; renovations began on the Hay’s third floor to turn the level into an all-purpose football palace; and advertisements featuring an action shot of Reshawn appeared in wider Blenheim. Reshawn is in profile in the photo, running rightward in his purple game uniform. The ball is squeezed between his bulged forearm and biceps, his right leg is crooked and sweeping over the head of a diving defender, while his left leg is poised on the ball of his foot as he leans forward to take on the next, out-of-frame opponent, aka The Future.
There wasn’t going to be an advertising campaign dedicated to
