The embarrassed girl gave a little gasp of horror. She reached out a terrified hand and tugged on her friend’s sleeve. “Let’sgo,” she whispered urgently, as if we couldn’t hear her.
To my surprise, Cris turned to me with a strange, hard smile on his face. “Perhaps it would be best if I removed my anchor pin,” he said to me.
Now it was my turn to gasp. “Please don’t,” I said. The anchor pin was one of three tokens he wore, and I knew what would happen if he took it off.
“They’re only speaking to us because I’m wearing it,” he said.
“Cris, I beg you not to,” I urged him again, feeling suddenlynear tears. What could I say to persuade him? I couldn’t appeal to his own sense of self-preservation, for he clearly cared nothing about it. I could only, selfishly, urge him to think about me. “In a few more months you’ll be done,” I said to him in an undertone, “but I’ll still make this same walk every day for four more years. If you take that pin off, do you think my walking here will be easier or harder?”
Cris looked troubled, and then for a moment aggrieved. He put his hand gently on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking of that. I wouldn’t wish to make your journey to and from school any harder.” Then, with a startling change, he turned to the two girls and gave a short bow. “Ladies, I’m sorry to have been so churlish. My brother and I walk this route every day, and we’ve never seen you before. And, I must admit, I was rather taken aback by your forwardness.”
The blond girl smiled. “Brigid tells me that I’m terribly forward.”
Brigid had gone from flushed to blanched. “Terribly, dreadfully,” she said weakly, and I wondered if she was about to faint.
“I’m Lynnette,” the other girl said comfortably, sticking out her hand. “What’s your name?”
Cris carried on the conversation for a few more minutes while I stood dumbly by, and then he concluded it with a gracious excuse about our mother requiring our presence at home. I’m sure Brigid and Lynnette came away from the encounter thoroughly charmed.
Not so my brother. As we walked home, he was at first lost in thought, and then he seemed to battle some inner antagonist who, as we neared Saddle Street, apparently gained the upper hand. “It just won’t do, Sam,” he said wearily, as we reached the limit of what we considered our neighborhood, our safe place.
“What won’t do, Cris?” I asked meekly.
“Other islanders in this city go about their business without tokens of any kind, or at least without tokens to disguise them. Why should we wear them? It’s sheer cowardice.”
“It’s not cowardice,” I protested. “It’s common sense. Mamá says so.”
Cris winced. “Mamá wants to protect us, Sam. Of course she does. But don’t you see that it’s not only a betrayal of those other men—those men who go about the city with their own skins—it’s also a betrayal ofourselves? We don’t look this way,” he said, gesturing to his face and mine. “By hiding who we are, we seem to say that wedeserveto be concealed.”
I listened to this, aghast. I had understood the notion that tokens were deceitful, but I’d never considered the problem in quite this light. My twelve-year-old self could say nothing in response to this devastating moral argument. I couldn’t say, as I would be able to many years later, that he was starting with a false premise, and that people with pink skin and light hair in Boston were no more honest about their true nature than we were. They showed their color because it proved an advantage to them, but they assiduously concealed their crooked teeth, bowed legs, and slack bellies, not to mention their lack of education, or their venality, or their indebtedness, or any number of other detrimental traits.
Everyoneconceals something, I would have said to Cris. Moreover, it wasn’t a level playing field. I believe my mother spoke correctly when she compared that first button to armor. For me and Cris and all the other men of foreign features, going into Boston without concealment was like heading into battle bare-chested. There was nothing to gain from it but injury.
Despite the paralyzing moral quandary presented to me by Cris, I continued to wear tokens. For a time I felt a horror of myself, and guilt every time I carefully donned my brass buckle, spectacles, and silver button. But then Cris finished school, and he went to Philadelphia to be apprenticed to a clockmaker, and Mamá and I temporarily lived alone. We both missed Cris greatly; all the disagreements of the last half year were forgotten. And in forgetting them, my earlier feelings toward enchantment reasserted themselves; the guilt eased, my enthusiasm reanimated itself, and I bent all my energy toward the project of gaining admission to Commonwealth University.
Here is the difficult truth about tokens—the reason why, even now when I have no need for them, I can’t entirely dismiss their importance. It isn’t simply that tokens allowed me to pass smoothly through school, earning approbation that otherwise would have been hard to come by, regardless of my intellect or hard work. It’s also true that tokens worn over a long period have a more enduring and penetrating effect on the wearer’s apprehension of himself. The tokens allowed me to look like the other students, which in turn allowed me to be judged on my intellectual and temperamental merits, which in turn allowed me to earn my teachers’ and classmates’ approval, which in turn allowed me to think of myself as a successful, intelligent student.
Webecomethe person we are perceived to be. The people around me beyond Saddle Street perceived me as Byron, a smart, affable boy who would doubtlessly study enchantment one day. Such perceptions are self-fulfilling prophecies. If I hadn’t worn the tokens, how would I have been perceived? Sam, the sullen boy who resented his station. Sam, the ungrateful child who couldn’t even look his fellows in the eye. Sam, the one who would never amount to much more than a delivery boy, or a carriage driver, or a cobbler.
It’s hard to believe in yourself when the rest of the world sees you as someone who has already lost.
You need not hear every moment of my progression through grade school. Suffice to say, by the time I found myself preparing my application for Commonwealth, my character was inextricably interwoven with the confidence acquired by how the world perceived me. I believed myself entitled to an education, and when I was admitted to Commonwealth, I felt wonderfully pleased but not surprised. My professors responded to Byron the same way my teachers had: with approval. I did well in my courses, and their approval suggested I might be anything I wished to be. Everything lay within reach for Byron.
In retrospect, I should have seen the warning signs. At home and around Saddle Street, I always removed my tokens and became Sam. But when I began my long-awaited, hard-earned studies of enchantment at Commonwealth, I lived on campus. I wore my tokens for longer and longer periods of time. On occasion, I even slept with the tokens on my person, and then I had the experience of rising in the morningas Byron. Sam appeared for only an hour or two during my waking hours, and in some sense he began to disappear.
What do I mean by this? Of course Sam was always there. I was Sam, and Sam was Byron. But Sam was becoming something elsebecauseof Byron. Byron wasn’t just pale with a protuberant nose; Byron spoke with a nearly Brahmin accent. Byron suggested, without ever actually stating it, that his family owned plantations in the East Indies. Byron left his boots outside his dormitory door for a servant to clean.
Byron, it must be admitted, was becoming detestable. And how could that not, also, affect Sam?
I had several instances that could have served to illuminatethis perilous descent, but the one I remember vividly occurred during my second year at Commonwealth. The university has several dining rooms, and each acquires an atmosphere or reputation from the students who dine there often. The fellows I spent time with mostly dined in a place we called “Tenny,” an affectionate sobriquet adapted from Tennyson Hall. Ours was a lively but decidedly second-class crowd: not quite wealthy and pedigreed enough for one set; not quite brilliant enough for another; and yet well above the common mass of students nonetheless. As we arrived in Tenny one evening in October, we found the large common room at the entrance reeking of beer. Naturally, a few quick jokes ensued, inebriated professors and so on, and then we discovered the source: an entire barrel of beer lay in pieces on the ground, its contents soaking both the carpets that lay before the evening fire and the fine wooden floors on either side. Two servants were diligently mopping and cleaning.
We went past them and into the dining room, and I thought little about the spilled beer during our meal until one of my companions, a young man we called “Flint” who thought of himself as a marvelous practical jokester, suggested we take our after-dinner drinks out to the common room before the fire. Someone objected that the room would still smell of beer, but Flint urged us on, saying we would sit on the other side of the hall.
You may have noticed that in such small groups of young men, none among them ever has a backbone. They need the strength of one another to animate any kind of action, however trivial, whether it be gaining the motivation to head out to dinner or acquiring the courage to attend a social gathering. Their momentum comes from one another; isolate a single man and he is paralyzed. And yet, once the momentum is achieved, braking can be difficult. I’ve experienced the overwhelming sense of beingcaught in a current, of being part of something larger than myself, of being unable to change my own manner even as I observed it with dislike. No tree, however stalwart, can stop a forest fire; all it can do is burn down with the rest.
And so we followed Flint out to the common room, where the two servants were still working, the barrel pieces gone and the carpet nearly restored to its former state. As we walked by them, I suddenly understood what was about to happen, and despite this I found myself powerless to stop it. Flint engaged in an exaggerated pantomime, pretending to catch his foot on the rug, and then the large glass of beer he was holding pitched into the air and onto the floor, shattering into pieces and dumping its contents everywhere, even onto the skirts of the maid.
I don’t recall what anyone said, but I do recall the sound of laughter and the flapping gestures of mock helplessness from Flint and then, cutting through the commotion like a scythe, the maid’s eyes meeting mine. Her glance had all the power of an enchantment. With a shock that landed like a blow, I felt that I was looking into my mother’s eyes. I froze, caught mid-laugh. Like an automaton, I followed my companions out of Tenny—the rest had abandoned their unspilled drinks on a table—and into the night. But they moved on without me, caught in their own hilarity, a little whirlwind of laughter and shoving and wicked delight. I stood outside in the cool air, taking deep breaths like a man who comes up from the bottom of a lake and finds, with surprise, that he has almost just drowned.
