The Last of the Savages Read Free

didn’t understand. After the committee had sullenly accepted the check and backed out of the room, he expressed his outrage that Will had given them anything. “I could have got to the twelve gauge,” he whined. “And Jessie had the thirty-eight.”
    “They have a legitimate grievance,” Will said, his former serenity restored. “Black artists have been getting ripped off in this business since it started.”
    “Not by you,” said Taleesha.
    “Maybe not.” He shrugged. “By people like me.”
    “They’re running a fucking protection racket,” Jack said.
    Will lit one of his corona-sized joints and inhaled. “We can all use a little extra protection.” It sounded like a line from a song.
    The G-men didn’t believe for a minute that anyone would casually give six thousand dollars to an unknown bunch of black radicals.
    “You’re saying they held him up at gunpoint?”
    “No, not exactly. He felt like giving it to them.”
    The special agent whose head looked like an aircraft carrier shook his head in disgust. “What the hell’s a clean-cut kid like you doing with a dangerous radical like Will Savage?”
    This would not be the first or the last time I heard some version of that question.

II
    W ill Savage and I were thrown together as juniors at prep school, late arrivals to the class of ’67, strangers to a cold New England campus which glows warmly in the memories of a half-dozen generations of American plutocrats. Although our new school was only forty miles from my home and a thousand miles from his, I’d traveled much farther than Will. He was the fifth Savage to matriculate, and the observatory bore the name of his maternal grandfather; I was a scholarship student from a New England mill town down the road, a dying redbrick museum of the Industrial Revolution ringed by fast food and auto dealerships. Will was from Memphis, Tennessee, the first real southerner I’d ever known.
    His luggage preceded him. When the housemaster showed me and my parents to the cell that would be my home for the next academic year, two large trunks layered with faded steamer stickers were stacked in the middle of the room, taking up most of the space between the two beds. I unpacked my plaid suitcase while my father made nervous conversation and my mother tried not to cry.
    “Your room at home is much nicer,” she said, as if trying to assure herself that this snotty school wasn’t too good for her son even as she was mourning the perceived necessity of my leaving the nest.
    “It’s not exactly the Ritz-Carlton,” my father agreed. Scared as I was, I wanted to be here, and I wanted to be alone in my new room. I resented this mild criticism. Already, I realize now, I was disowning them in my heart.
    My mother is, shall we say, a noticeable woman: nearly six feet tall, she has a bust like the prow of a ship. The fact that she had always been a doting and devoted mother did not prevent me from feeling, somewhere around the dawn of puberty, acutely embarrassed by her sheer physical volume, bright clothing and clarion voice, its broad adenoidal vowels redolent of the tenements of South Boston. She compounded the crime of being the parent of an adolescent by being so damnably conspicuous. My father, as if to compensate, tended to recede; he is, in fact, two inches shorter than my mother, and this, too, was a source of chagrin. Fathers were supposed to be taller and, when visiting their sons’ prep schools, were not supposed to wear checked sports jackets worn shiny at the elbows, nor polyester ties. This much, even I knew. I was, in short, an ungrateful little shit.
    As we’d walked across the lawn to the house, I felt the casual reconnaissance of three young men with lacrosse sticks languidly flicking a ball back and forth, and felt myself wanting. My clothes, my hair, my very walk, did not pass muster. For this I blamed my parents. Now, on the verge of leaving home for the first time in my life, and actually forever,