White People Read Online Free PDF

getting ridiculous, young man. I’m asking you to bring that to me. Are you going to bring it or aren’t you? It’s that simple.”
    I have included him here, but that makes the drawing even more mine, less his. It’s the one thing in this house of his that’s really mine right now. The man’s mouth is a single horizontal line. The boy’s a silly U-shape. “It’s mine,” I say quietly.
    “You said it was a picture of me.”
    “It is, but I’m the one that did it. Please Daddy, don’t make me this time.”
    A long silence from the far end of the table. “I’m waiting, Bryan. Bring that down here right this second.”
    Almost before I think of it, the crayon is scribbling. In tight black loops it traps and then eclipses half the page. I choose one figure. The face and hands are lost forever underneath an oily whorl. There is the chanting from the front yard, the scratchy circling of my crayon, less loud as black wax accumulates. My exertion delicately clinks his coffee cup against its saucer. As I scrawl, feeling sick and elated at this solution, I grind my teeth and stare straight at my enormous father, smaller than usual at the far end of the table. He seems to be sitting for a portrait as I furiously describe a neat black cyclone on the page. His jaw is set. I can hear his breathing. I know the signs. Any second he will lunge down here, grab me by the shirt, lift and shake me, slap me once with a hand the full size of my head; he’ll shove me, stumbling, toward my room, shrieking in my own defense. Now, just as he places both palms on the table to come for me, I stand. I lift the drawing by its upper corners and carry the page as if wet.
    I move toward his chair, the only chair with arms. He is waiting there to punish me for drawing during summer, for drawing anything but him all day, for then un-drawing him without permission. I stare between his eyes at the faint inch making two eyebrows one grim horizontal line.
    I warily approach him in my acolyte’s gait. I hold up the drawing, a white flag, between his body and mine. I am now beside his chair. Seated, he is just as tall as I am standing. On his forehead there are rows of pores, and over that the teeth marks where the comb passed through his hair. His back is pressed straight against the chair, hands still tense on the table’s edge. Over his business mail I place my artwork. One flimsy piece of white paper with some colored markings on it. His eyes move from my face down to my drawing. He sees the figure there. I hear him quietly exhale. His solid hands reach out and pick the paper up. I am very conscious of the hands. There Iam, that’s me, I feel him thinking. He has recognized himself. I release my breath and gratefully inhale some of Miss Whipple’s wonder at my own imagination. Good for something, it has just spared me a whipping. I’ve sketched an image of him for himself, while I am permanently off the page, and saved. He is not asking why the uniformed gentleman’s longer arm is weighed with this bristling black cancellation. He is now responding to the easy magic of a drawing of a uniform on a tall figure, the horizontal mouth, the buttons and braid.
    “So, there I am …,” he says, relaxing. “Why’d you do this crossing out? What was that under there?”
    I have lost interest in the drawing. I stare out the window at the summer lawn where my brother and six neighbor kids are climbing a young evergreen, tilting it almost to the ground. “Nothing,” I say.
    “So, there I am. Those are sure some ears you gave me. What are these round things here on front? Are those medals? Medals for what?” He hesitates to risk a guess. I look back from the Venetian blinds and stare at him. He sits studying the drawing, his face rosy, jovial now. More than anything, I want suddenly to hug him, to move forward and throw my arms around his neck. I want to cry and have him hold me. Lift me off the floor and up into the air and hold me. Instead,