by Donna Britt
Sex became more about what I could get, and I never got much. My desire wasn’t for pricey gifts or fancy dinners but for acknowledgment and appreciation. Without them, the letting go required for satisfying lovemaking was impossible. Relaxing had resulted in the worst pain of my life; letting go was dangerous. For all my giving, I had trouble allowing myself the sweetest abandonment life could offer. No matter what my body was doing, part of me stayed remote, kept something vital for myself.
Sex became pretty much pointless. Which didn’t keep me from having it.
The next two years were full: a summer internship at Redbook magazine, the return of True Love in the form of a witty and thoughtful New York University basketball player named Michael, and in 1976, graduation from Hampton, followed by admission to the University of Michigan’s graduate journalism program through Booth Newspapers’ minority fellowship program. My first day of classes, I fixed my hair in a topknot so businesslike that no one would guess I was cowering inside. Many of my fellow students would be white graduates of colleges more prestigious than mine. Could I compete? When the program chief asked us about ourselves, I self-consciously recited my résumé.
Weeks later, I discussed that first day with my favorite fellow master’s candidates, who of course were men: Garth, a Michigan farm boy, and John, a wry Ohioan. “You were so gorgeous and intimidating,” John said, sounding like he meant it. Added Garth: “You worked for Redbook! You made the rest of us feel like crap.”
Me gorgeous? Intimidating? It hadn’t occurred to me that my white classmates might see me as threatening. All I thought they’d see was black. I still assumed every white person must be secretly contemptuous of me—and might hurt and reject me. I remembered being six and seeing black protesters hosed and beaten.
Becoming friends with white students challenged many such assumptions. Like Hampton, Michigan taught me about diversity—white diversity. If all white students secretly disdained blacks, many put on an astonishingly good act. If they were innately more studious and mature than their black counterparts, I had no explanation for U of M’s obvious slackers or the rivers of vomit outside “kegger” parties. White prejudice had shaped my life. Yet I hadn’t realized how little time I’d spent around actual white people.
Now they were everywhere. And I was drawn to my fellow master’s candidates, despite part of me feeling that I should know better. My quandary came down to a question: Could my white classmates have any inkling of how it felt to be black in America? Or of all that their whiteness had bought them?
The sensitive ones, I figured, had to have imagined what being African-American was like, perhaps even envisioned themselves enrobed in blackness. Had they been shaken by the thought of being trapped in the skin they feared in restive places hidden by their goodness? Was their kindness toward me an acknowledgment of that revulsion, of their unspoken gratitude for the haven their whiteness provided? If it was, then I was grateful for it. That might be the best a white person could do: try to rise above his or her aversion.
But imagining something is one thing. Living it is another. Racism had wounded and angered me for so long, I had plenty to rise above myself. Like feeling that for my white classmates, my blackness—a natural, unbidden fact of my existence—overwhelmed all else. Life had taught me that the skin and the culture I was born into, which I might easily have seen as a full-throated blessing, were somehow a curse. Yet the racism that had ravaged my self-regard had been a blessing for each and every one of them. Because no matter how ugly, clumsy, stupid, poor, or untalented a white person was, he or she could take a bit of comfort, feel some spark of superiority with this thought: At least I’m not black. Did my classmates know what a gift it was, not to feel rejected before they could utter a word?
Yet my suspicion and resentment couldn’t stop me from giving: giving white students (who, as far as I knew, hadn’t beaten or hosed a soul) a chance. I understood fellow black students who separated themselves, whose hurt and mistrust led them to negotiate U of M from the protection of a safe, black bubble. But I couldn’t join them. I couldn’t deny white classmates the opportunity to know me, an open, honest-to-God black woman, or deny myself the chance to know them as individuals, through discussions, debates, and one confession I’ll never forget.
Our class had been passionately discussing racism when I noticed that Katie, a sharp-faced blonde, looked like a child working herself up to admitting something she’d be spanked for. “My father told me that black people don’t feel romantic love,” Katie began. The room went silent. “Carnal lust, yes. Real love, no.”
With classmates’ gazes beating like hailstones against my skin, I was flooded by images: of every man who’d sent my soul soaring, of every poem, flower, love letter, and secret a brother had entrusted me with. People like Katie’s dad weren’t content with denying us respect or jobs. They would deny us our humanity, our love. I admired Katie’s courage for her admission, but I don’t recall having the courage to ask, Did you believe him?
It didn’t matter. Admitted or denied, racism was too slippery to contain or make sense of. I already suspected what later would become undeniable: the same fear of racism that had made me suspicious of them had also made me better. I worked to avoid being like black folks whom racism had silenced, whom it had crushed into “what’s the use?” paralysis. I was a giver, so that’s how I’d fought it: by giving more. They thought I couldn’t be brilliant or insightful? I studied harder, worked longer, analyzed more deeply, to prove them wrong. In my every public moment, I’d been representing the race. An ambassador for blackness, I’d sharpened my speech, fattened my vocabulary, spoken out in every class, never giving them the satisfaction of my mediocrity. The responsibility felt as heavy and palpable as a boulder.
There was sweetness in the irony of knowing that something so hated had helped me to excel. Yet I would have happily traded it for the gift every white girl held, unknowingly, in both hands: the chance just to represent—to be—herself.
I adored my tiny studio in Ann Arbor, with its makeshift meals cooked in a tiny oven, its easy-to-stow sofa bed. With no Mom to urge it, I washed every dish, symmetrically arranged each pillow, and set a table so pretty that I rarely marred it by eating from it. What filled me was the joy of providing beauty, good food, and a warm home only to me.
But my beloved apartment cut deeply into my stipend. Learning about a job opening for a resident director at the Helen Newberry women’s dorm, I envisioned living cost-free in an ivy-kissed Colonial manse housing one hundred freshman girls—a dorm full of the little sisters I’d never had. Interviewing for the position with several young residents, I adopted the offhand insouciance I’d once used with Bruce’s friends (“I’m older and hipper but you’re cool too”) and got the job.
I was now in my second year of teaching freshman journalism, a requirement of my grad school fellowship. I was surprised by how little my students cared that a segment of their journalism class at this pricey, Big 10 university was taught by a graduate student barely older than they were. Among my most engaged students was sandy-haired Jon, who one day after class grabbed my books and walked me to my dorm.
At Newberry, Jon pretended not to notice my young charges’ delight at seeing a cutie their age accompanying me. He began walking me home after every class, chatting up whichever young women were hanging outside my room. When someone suggested Jon actually had a crush on me, I laughed. Please.
Although I’d feared losing the autonomy of my apartment, I loved being an R.D. After years of catering to men, I enjoyed assuring girls of how pretty and smart they were, providing hugs and tissues when they cried. Girls were so grateful. I’d never realized how entitled guys had seemed to my praise and neck rubs.
Was gratitude, like the giving that inspired it, a woman thing?
Bruce had graduated from West Side and to everyone’s horror had rejected college, which—after observing Steve’s and Darrell’s checkered college experiences—he had no interest i
n. Working as a grinder at U.S. Steel, Bruce saved every cent and within months had paid cash for a new Chevy Nova. But he hated the mill, whose chief lesson seemed to be that hands encased in work gloves all day can stink as much as sweaty feet. Weekend after weekend, Bruce drove to Ann Arbor to bask in the admiration of Newberry girls, who convulsed at his jokes and gushed about his cuteness.
Darrell never joined him. He’d gotten an apartment in Miller, a beach community on Lake Michigan, and a job at Bethlehem Steel. I rarely talked to my still-beloved brother, not even about important things—like how, after thirty years of bitterness, Mom and Daddy had gotten a divorce, a move that was surprising only in that it had taken so long. Painfully familiar with the marriage’s problems, my brothers and I felt little need to discuss it. We felt not grief but relief. I didn’t talk much with Darrell about his experiences in Los Angeles, either. He seemed chastened somehow, still warm and hilarious but hardly encouraging of questions about his California adventure. Stifling my curiosity for the time being, I kept up with him largely through Mom and Bruce.
I didn’t worry overmuch about the distance between us. I knew in my bones: two people who’d been as close as we had would always be there for each other.
Losing Darrell
Mom and Darrell striking a pose by their Gary home, 1975.
Sometimes, he comes to me in dreams. Each time, he is as young and solid and whole as he was when he left. He’s as real as the red flannel shirt that I buried my face in after he died, which obligingly clung to his scent for years. As real as the afternoons when we chatted as I watched him practice on our backyard basketball court, when he’d slide to his left, set up, shoot the ball, and retrieve it, talking to me throughout. As real as the times he searched the refrigerator for bologna to fry for sandwiches we could share. That’s how alive he is. Like in the dream before I married Kevin. There he stood in a tree-dotted field. Smiling. Clasped in his hand was a bouquet of balloons, white and red and straining toward heaven. “I’ll be at your wedding,” he said, kissing a hurt I hadn’t realized I had. “Don’t worry,” he said, his smile as buoyant as the balloons he held out to me. “I’ll be there.”
Some things you don’t forget: like my first words when I learned during a late-September phone call in 1977 that Darrell might be dead.
I was in the midst of talking to my mother, updating her on my fall classes and the girls at Helen Newberry. An official-sounding male voice identifying itself as from the Lake County Coroner’s Office cut into the line. When the voice asked if Mom knew Elwood Britt, Mom said, “I’m his ex-wife.” The voice paused. Without thinking, I blurted: “Where’s Bruce?”
Hours and days and years later, I replayed the two words that demonstrated how completely my younger brother had usurped Darrell’s place in my consciousness. The desolation I’d felt when Darrell left for I.U. was long gone; by the time he moved to Miller, his absence rarely troubled me. Bruce’s wit and openness matched Darrell’s; his chumminess with my friends in Ann Arbor was the icing. He had become my most indispensable brother.
The voice asked Mom if she knew Darrell Britt. When she said, “Yes… is he all right?” it asked her to come to Mercy Hospital. Panicked, Mom said she’d call me back. I hung up. Waited.
But I already knew I had betrayed my brother.
A sharp, regretful pang echoes inside me each time I remember my instinctive words. “Where’s Bruce?” suggested that I, too, had abandoned Darrell, who must have felt terribly alone in that ravine when the policemen fired their guns at him. Did his spirit, already freed from that dear body, hear my response? Did he feel I loved him less? Darrell had developed an independent life. His secrets were no longer my province; his thoughts, frustrations, and activities were largely unknown to me. I had a life, too, and little time to keep tabs on an increasingly distant brother.
Though I’d told myself it was okay because someday we would pick up where we’d left off, what actually happened was that I stopped looking for him. I stopped seeking him out as the one to coax confidences from, confess secrets to, comfort, and be comforted by. Suddenly our growing apart, a process inevitable among even the closest siblings, was unforgivable. Darrell had stopped looking for me, too, but that hardly mattered. He was gone. And he’d left me with a question:
How could I have stopped paying attention?
After what seemed like an eternity, Mom called back to say what I already knew: Darrell was dead. He’d been shot to death by Gary police; she had no idea how or why. I should come home immediately. Hanging up, I sat very still, tried to absorb it. Darrell had been shot. By the police. But Steve was the one who courted trouble, stole things, bucked authority. That afternoon, I caught a bus whose passengers must have wondered why the girl with one of the window seats wouldn’t stop sobbing.
As the days passed, I learned more about Darrell’s death. None of it made sense, starting with what the police had reported:
On the morning of September 27, a male homeowner in Miller (the mostly white lakefront neighborhood where Darrell was renting an apartment) called to report that a man had tried to slip his hand into the window of his truck. The truck’s owner had told the police that he had confronted the stranger—Darrell—and asked what he was doing. “I’ve got to get home,” Darrell reportedly said, trembling. “Will you take me home?”
Convinced that the interloper was on drugs, the truck’s owner told Darrell to wait while he called the police so they could take him home. In fact, he told them something quite different: he was “holding” someone who was trying to steal his truck.
The two white patrolmen who responded, Officers Jerry Cyprian and Daniel Mattox, said they found Darrell in a nearby ravine, a tire clutched in one hand, a broken bottle top in the other. Without provocation, they said, he shouted, “I’m going to kill you!” and—despite their having fired two warning shots—charged at one of them with a chain, a brick, a plastic baseball, and a three-foot length of pipe. They pumped one .357 Magnum bullet into his chest and another into his left thigh. Within minutes, he was dead.
One more thing: According to the police, the man in the ravine was barefoot and wearing an aluminum cooking pot on his head. The truck owner had told them he was crouched “like a native hunter” while chanting something unintelligible before standing and saying to no one in particular, “Take me higher.”
This was the official report that I’d hoped would bring clarity to Darrell’s out-of-nowhere killing. Instead, it shifted an already confusing incident into the surreal. Darrell, who was working as a laborer at Bethlehem Steel, had no history of mental problems. An autopsy would find no alcohol or narcotics in his blood.
The world as I knew it slipped free of its hinges. As it floated untethered, a deepening sense of unreality permeated everything.
I remember those days, weeks, and months as if they were a movie, a confounding indie consisting of long stretches of indistinct images intercut with scenes of cut-glass clarity. Hazy footage included a large meeting at our house among family members and friends about whether to take legal action against the police, who were performing their own investigation. The room was thick with rage, fear, and despair. Steve was the most vocal among those who felt we should aggressively challenge the absurd circumstances claimed by the police. Others suggested we await autopsy results. Still others felt we should cut our losses, let the police be. They’d already demonstrated they were brutes. What if our prodding and questioning inspired them to prove it again?
As the different factions argued, I sat mute, my customary feistiness extinguished. Darrell really must be dead, I thought. Why else would a dozen family members be screaming at one another in our den? I had no strength to challenge the ridiculousness of my assumption that the universally apparent wrongness of Darrell’s killing would be recognized. I mean, really—two men with guns against a guy with a tire and a broken bottle?
Much clearer is my picture of Darrell in his coffin at the funeral home, his thick eyelashes meet
ing his cheeks, the skin and mouth that resembled his except for their pallidness. Darrell’s stiff body looked vacant, like a sturdy building whose occupants had inexplicably fled. While I stood there, Darrell’s friend and roommate Fred entered the room, took one look, and shook his head, saying, “Naw. Naw!” He tore away.
Most vivid is the memory of my mother taking photographs of that bewildering corpse; why would she want to preserve such an image? I was more empathetic a few days later in a department store dressing room as she tried on dresses for her son’s funeral. “I want to look nice for him,” she said.
Each family member reacted differently to Darrell’s death. As always, Daddy said the least. But the pained disbelief on his face as he described watching a morgue staffer separate his son’s nude body from an assortment of naked black corpses spoke volumes.
Mom had been driving down Fifth Avenue when she heard a radio announcement of a shooting in Miller of an unidentified man. Killing, killing, I’m so sick of this killing, she’d thought. Like me, she had countless questions and not a single satisfactory answer. Were the police lying? Why had they killed Darrell rather than wounding him? Had Darrell tried LSD or another drug that might have lingered in his system, roaring back to spur his puzzling behavior that day? She knew he’d done drugs; he once described trying something that made him feel he’d left his body. The week before he was killed, Darrell had fasted, ingesting only water and juice. Could cleansing his system have made him susceptible to some weird delayed drug reaction?
For weeks after her son’s death, Mom, who worked for the state of Indiana canvassing local businesses for job openings, stopped every policeman she saw to ask if he knew anything about the incident. None said yes. My uncle John knew Officer Mattox; he sometimes drank at the same bar as the redheaded cop, and described him to my mother. One afternoon Mom spied a short, red-haired policeman, walked up to him, and asked if he was Mattox. When he said yes, she shakily told him her name. Then, looking in the eyes of one of the men who had killed her second-born child, she asked, “Why was my son killed?” Instead of answering, Mom recalls, Mattox started asking her questions. “Have you got any proof we were wrong? If you do, bring it forward.” Mattox told her the shooting was Darrell’s fault because he’d had a length of chain with a lock on it that he’d swung around his head as if to hit them. Standing her ground, Mom told him that shooting “someone” in the leg or knee would have stopped him.