Chapter 13
The police threw me in the back of a car where Jay was waiting already, eyes downtrodden, his posture slumped, surely pondering
his fall from grace.
I’d have touched his arm to make sure he was all right, but my hands were pinned behind my back. So I shuffled over and laid
my head on his chest.
Jay didn’t resist it. The policeman, as he took off, noticed it in the mirror. He kept noticing it until we arrived at the
precinct, in fact, but there was no comment on the touching—only constant glancing.
The police station was a nasty place of cold white tunnels and iron bars that made you wonder why humans treated humans like
animals. Once they let us out of the handcuffs and pushed us into a cell, Jay’s first move was to wipe something off the bottom
of my chin, but he resigned to stop wiping it when nothing came off.
He went to the little sink on the wall and washed his hands. We were still bleeding some from our mouths when they closed the cell door behind us.
Jay looked absolutely panicked as he paced the room. “Do you know what this will look like on our records?”
“The sky isn’t falling, Jay. Our faces are so dirty they may not even realize who you are.”
“I’m Jay Gatsby,” he said. “Of course they know who I am.”
That caused me to laugh—how pompous of him to think random police officers knew who he was—but Jay wasn’t laughing. He took
himself very seriously.
He charged up to the cell bars and grabbed them and called to the hallway, “Hello? I need my phone call!”
Much to my surprise, a guard came and opened the cell, but he didn’t even look at me. It was as if I was not entitled to a
phone call.
Jay turned back to me and said, “I’ll call my father,” before disappearing down the hallway.
I waited for five minutes, knowing Jay would come back.
Then another five minutes passed, and he was still out there, laughing with the police as I lay on the sheetless mattress,
staring up at the stone ceiling.
I felt so lonely and abandoned. Jay preferred to be out there talking to them than in here with me. I was sure the guard let
him out because his skin was lighter than mine. I also knew that if I had physically fought a police officer today, I might
be dead.
Jay could have been using his charisma to get something across to them about what we were fighting for and why they shouldn’t
stop it next time. But that’s not what it sounded like.
Jay laughed again, louder this time, and I wished they would stop.
Can I trust you? I wondered as I rotted for an hour in the grime of a cage from which Jay had been freed.
His father arrived later but did not walk into the precinct. I only knew we were leaving when Jay came racing back with the
keys calling, “Nick!”
I almost rolled my eyes as he unlocked the cell. He may as well have been running the place now.
Gatsby Sr. was waiting for us in a sleek four-passenger car, facing forward like the main subject of a stoic painting. Jay
got into the front and I got into the back.
“Hello there,” Gatsby said in a low tone, but he didn’t turn around, so I could only assume he was talking to me.
“Hi,” I returned.
“Can Nick come home with us?” Jay asked his pa as the car took off.
“It’s okay,” I intercepted. “My family will be expecting me at home.”
“You need to clean up,” Jay said, turning to look at me. “Somewhere better than the cell.”
Does he think I don’t have a shower at home? I thought, in horror. How dare he?
This was what I got for messing with the rich—silent judgment.
Jay’s father was as white as white could be.
He was not approachable. Status oozed off him like an overdose of maple syrup and it showed from the jewelry he wore.
One of his hands rested on the gearshift knob as he drove, as if it were waiting for something more important to do than aid in the steering of the wheel.
On just that hand were three gemstones—one blue, one green, and one a combination of both colors, all with gold bands. Did he think himself a superhero?
I was quiet on the drive. So were the two Jays, save for a quick exchange about if Jay had taken care of the washing of some
linens. It was as if they had nothing substantial to talk about.
Once we were back in Gatsby’s home, he told Jay to wait in his room and asked me to follow him to his study.
“Forgive the mess, if you will,” he said as we arrived, but there was no mess at all. The room was cozy and inviting, filled
with bookshelves and small lamps. Maps, guns, and birds adorned the walls in a striking mosaic, complementing the chevron-patterned
rug beneath our feet.
Gatsby sat in a chair and motioned for me to sit on the sofa across from him. I did so, hesitant to get too comfortable. Between
us was a table, and on the table, a teapot and two mugs.
“If I had a servant, I’d ask her to warm us up some tea,” Mr. Gatsby said, gesturing to the teapot. “But I don’t believe in
that.” He watched me for a response, and I didn’t give him one. “My son has told me a lot about you,” he went on.
“He has?” I asked. “What did he say?”
“That you are one of West Egg’s brightest pupils,” he replied with a smile. “That you came here from Oklahoma, as I understand
it, to flee terror, and you found your way into our academy.”
I thought he’d want to talk about the protest or us getting arrested, but it was like he’d invited me over for a tea party instead.
In this moment, Gatsby shifted, much like a chameleon, and almost seemed to be a friendly man.
When I looked at him head on, I saw his son’s mouth and the same inquisitive spirit emerge in
his eyes.
“Somehow I did,” I said. “I’m thankful to you for the acceptance at West Egg.” I wanted to be gracious. Despite his calm,
I knew there must have been anger he was holding in under the mask.
“And yet this protest,” Gatsby said, changing his tone. “It was spurred on by dissatisfaction with the school, if I’m not
mistaken.”
“Someone tried to kill us in our sleep,” I said. “That’s what started it.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?” he asked.
That gave me pause. “There was more than one fire,” I reminded him. “It was arson.”
It seemed this was the first he’d heard of it. Even so, he was strangely peaceful about the burning of his very own school.
“I understand your anger about the attack at West Egg,” he said. “And what happened in Greenwood was an unconscionable attempt
at mass murder—going through it twice must be highly traumatic. But you understand people are different in New York than they
are there. There’s a place for your passion, and it’s in the debates over where this country is headed, rather than the streets.”
I couldn’t help but scoff. “The country ought to head in a place where students don’t have to worry about their school burning
down. But we do.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t keep things safer on campus,” Gatsby said, with no emotion.
“Speaking of campus,” I said. “I couldn’t help but notice the houses were segregated.”
Gatsby laughed with discomfort. “Well, the sorting system is based on aptitude, rather than race. We give an IQ test on par
with the model set by schools across the state of New York.”
“But an IQ test doesn’t really capture everything, does it? People from the North and South—it feels like we’re from different
worlds. I don’t think your test gave me much room to show what I’m actually good at.”
The man swallowed his first reaction and then said, “I can assure you that is merely coincidental. There are several nuances
to account for when transitioning Southern boys to the Northern system.”
“I know,” I said dismissively. “Lots of people think we are naturally more stupid.”
“Well, we don’t—I don’t. You’ve got a friend in me, Nick. But if you want to be taken seriously, I do believe you cheapen your own cause by
using noise to solve your problem.”
My problem, sir? Clearly, it’s the problem of everybody in New York! I bit my words. I wasn’t violent. It was the police that were violent.
“The protest was peaceful,” I said. “The police brought the violence.”
“Well, as I understand it, some of the boys were destroying property.”
“Those were signs, not people,” I told him, my tone becoming more hostile.
“You must have been a boy when W. E. B. Du Bois organized his silent march to protest lynchings,” Gatsby said, his voice quieter
now. “It was a powerful sight that started a national conversation about finding a peaceful solution to tough problems.”
“I respect Du Bois very much,” I said. “And so did my father. But Du Bois’s march—did it bring any of the victims back? Or
are the victims still dead?”
Gatsby went silent, and I nearly bit my lip.
Pa’s words roared through my mind. Peaceful protest comes from the right question but the wrong solution. The white man’s insistence on peaceful protest is a
silencing ploy. He should know better than anyone that when you want something, you must take it.
Gatsby would tune me out if I spoke with the blazing energy of my father, so I said nothing else. But I did stand up, to show
how ready I was to walk out. I watched Mr. Gatsby in silent annoyance, waiting for him to speak again.
“Nick, I have a Colored son,” he said, gently.
Do you want a trophy?
“I’ve seen the way they’ve raised the bar for him,” he went on. “And for you, it must be worse—I can’t imagine—but you must
be strategic about the way you get your message across.”
“I arrived in this city with nothing but a sack of change,” I said. “So I know about the bar; I’ve seen so much of it at West Egg, oddly. You should know about prejudice, sir. Your wife left the U.S. because of it.”
His face froze like an older Colored man’s would, if you’d disrespected him. “What do you know about my wife?” he hissed.
“I . . . I’ve been spending time with your son, sir. He’s a friend to me. One of the only friends I’ve made at West Egg.”
“And he’s told you details about our family. What else has he told you?” He seemed nervous, like he had something to hide.
I’d revealed too much about my relationship with his son. All I could do was keep going and stand on my own side. “Not very
much, but we understand each other. I’d never want to do anything that would put him in danger.”
“I don’t want you to put him in danger, either,” Mr. Gatsby said. “An arrest is a bad look for our family and a bad look for
his future. I don’t blame you for this, Nick. I can let it go this once, but our family doesn’t do things like this. With
my son, I would advise you to tread carefully.”
I knew then that I’d blown my chances of being a good person in his eyes. Gatsby believed that tolerance could turn bad people
good and even deter them from being bad. But that to me sounded like being good and silent and waiting for justice to fall
in my lap. We did not see eye to eye.
In that drawing room, under the gilded domed ceiling, I realized that all of this was beautiful—and owned by a man with a
forgiving mindset for oppression.
He wanted me to stay away from Jay, but there was no way I would do that. And what Jay’s father didn’t know wouldn’t hurt
him.
The conversation with Gatsby had left me feeling like I was running out of air. I didn’t like the way he delivered his message, with that polite tone as if he were above anger.
When I stepped out of his study, Jay was waiting in the hallway to guide me to his bathroom to clean up, where we walked in
silence.
“Everything go okay in there?” he asked.
I hesitated, stopping to stare at the estate, which stretched from Jay’s open balcony doors to Long Island Sound, with its
calm, glistening waters dappled by lights on the horizon. “Yeah,” I said finally, choosing to keep my true thoughts in. “Of
course.”
Jay nodded. “I’m sorry if he was stiff,” he said quietly. “He can be like that.”
“No, it’s all right,” I lied, eyes diving to the ground. “Truly.”
I was willing to entertain, for Jay’s sake, that maybe Mr. Gatsby was right about needing to be more careful, at the very
least.
We reached the bathroom, and I lingered at the threshold for a moment. Jay opened his mouth, like he was going to say something,
but then he stopped himself when I didn’t turn to look at him.
I was grateful for the bath. But more than anything, I wished I were home. Some thoughts could only be unraveled in the comfort
of the familiar—the soft bickering of my cousin and uncle, the smell of Auntie’s soup on the stove. These days, it was the
only place I longed to be when the world made me feel out of place.