Looking for Lily

by Africa Fine

  A white Lexus sat in the driveway of Jeremiah’s home. It was a two-story Victorian with yellow and white tulips in clay planters on either side of the door. I parked in the long driveway and took a look at the hundred-year-old oak that shaded most of the grass. I got out and walked to the door, looking inside the Lexus as I passed by it, hoping to find clues about its owner. Two plastic CD cases sat on the passenger seat. I couldn’t see who the artists were, but I decided against a closer look. I didn’t want the neighbors, or Jeremiah, to catch me peeping into his car.

  Bricked steps led up to the door, and a flowered welcome mat lay spotless at the doorway. It occurred to me that the tulips, the mat, and the car all seemed very feminine. Maybe I had the wrong house, the wrong Jeremiah. Maybe he didn’t even live here. I rang the doorbell and felt an urge to run back to my car and leave. After a moment, I decided to do just that. Then the door opened.

  The man who stood there was tall, well over six feet. His hair was cropped close to his head, but I could still see that it was brown flecked with white. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a neat mustache and beard, which, unlike his hair, were gray. His skin was the same pale shade that I’d noticed in the photo at Aunt Gillian’s house, and it occurred to me for the first time that with his patrician features and skin tone, Jeremiah could pass for white.

  Unlike some older men, he didn’t stoop. His posture was erect and relaxed at the same time, and he was casual, dressed in soft khaki slacks and a button-down oxford shirt that looked comfortable and expensive. I knew he must be at least seventy years old, or maybe older, but he looked ten years younger.

  He held a rolled-up newspaper in one hand and he held out the other. I took it and he led me inside. It wasn’t until I was standing on the polished wood floors of his foyer that he spoke.

  “You’re Gillian’s daughter. You look just like her.”

  I was taken aback. “What? No. I’m her niece. Ernestine Jones. Tina. But she raised me. How did you know?” I was babbling. No one had ever told me I looked just like Aunt Gillian. I had found the right Jeremiah Jackson.

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Niece? You’re named after Ernest McElroy?”

  I nodded, wondering why he seemed to find this so surprising.

  “He was my father.” I figured he must already know that, but his question seemed to demand a response.

  He nodded. I had the feeling he was agreeing to let something go for now.

  “So I guess you know who I am.”

  I nodded again. I had lost my voice. He looked at me for a moment, still smiling.

  “I read about Gillian’s house in the newspaper.” He answered my question before I could ask. “It wasn’t a big story, just a little blurb, but I read the paper every day. Cover to cover.”

  He gestured with the rolled-up newspaper. We stood in the foyer a few moments longer, and I grew embarrassed at my silence. I was a college professor, a grown woman, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to my uncle.

  “Why don’t we go to the living room? I’ll make some tea.”

  “That would be nice.”

  I followed Jeremiah down the hall to the back of the house, where the hallway opened out into a spacious living area. I sank into a deep sofa and looked around the room. The walls and the sofa were all pure white, complementing the cherry wood floors. The room was large and open, with a cathedral ceiling and tall windows along one wall. The white linen sheers were pulled closed, but through the gauzy fabric I could see an enormous backyard. I was struck by the simple beauty of the house, and I wondered how a man with such refined sensibilities could have loved Aunt Gillian, even all those years ago.

  The room was sparse: two sofas, two comfortable-looking chairs, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along two of the walls. Like me, Jeremiah was a reader. I got up to look at the books. I have always believed that you can tell a lot about a person by the books they read. Jeremiah’s shelves were filled with history books and paperback mysteries. I was wondering what this said about him when he returned with a blue and white ceramic teapot, teacups, and a plate of small butter cookies on a silver tray.

  After he poured the tea, I decided to tell him the simple truth.

  “I know it’s strange for me to just show up here. I just want to know more about my family, and I thought you might be able to help.”

  “And Gillian won’t talk about the past.”

  At that moment, I relaxed. We had Aunt Gillian in common.

  “You know how she is. Or you did know at one time, anyway. That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about—if you don’t mind.”

  Jeremiah titled his head to the side and looked toward the windows. After a while, he turned back to me.

  “I don’t mind your asking. I’m an old man, living alone. It’s nice to have company.” He paused. “But maybe you could answer a question for me before we start.”

  “Of course. I should tell you about myself before interrogating you, Mr. Jackson. I’ll answer any questions you have.”

  “I just wondered about Gill. How is she?”

  There it was again. “Gill.” The way he said it was familiar and gentle, and I knew then that he still felt something for my aunt.

  “She’s good. She’s okay, I mean. Getting older. She lives with me in Florida.” I didn’t want to tell him about her problems. Not yet.

  He smiled and sat back in his chair. “Call me Jeremiah.”

  Chapter 18

  “She was more beautiful than ever”

  It wasn’t love at first sight. Jeremiah felt he was in a position to avoid such entanglements. In September of 1952, the Korean War was still going on, but Jeremiah had been back in the States for several months. He’d joined the Army out of boredom rather than a true desire to serve his country. He was not so naïve as to believe that America was a black man’s country. But joining was what young men did, and so Jeremiah went.

  He was lucky in that he never got near any actual military conflict. He was stationed in Seoul with a unit that wrote Army-approved dispatches that purported to tell the truth about the conflict. He had no parents, having grown up in a Cleveland orphanage, and so there was no one to whom he could write letters about the spoils of war, which, for Jeremiah, meant sheltered Korean women who yearned for the kind of carefree sexual excitement he was happy to provide.

  He remained in Seoul for more than two years before another stroke of luck befell him. He was injured in an automobile accident involving several American military vehicles. He suffered a broken leg and collarbone, and these injuries were just bad enough to earn Jeremiah a medical discharge but not bad enough to cause permanent damage.

  When the third stroke of luck occurred—his acceptance to Howard University based, as far as he could tell, on his status as a former soldier, Jeremiah concluded that he was in fact a very lucky person. There had always been evidence of this. Despite the fact his mother died giving birth to him and he had never known his father, his life in the orphanage had not been unpleasant. This was due to his instinct, developed early on, that capitalism was the key to self-preservation. He learned to steal extra treats from the communal lunch tables and then barter them to other children who were hungry but not as brave as he. As he grew older, Jeremiah figured out how to get other items in high demand—cigarettes, the occasional beer, candy—and he sold them to all takers. He operated this miniature black market until he was seventeen, when the nuns who operated the orphanage found him out and gave him a choice: discontinue his enterprise and stay another six months until his eighteenth birthday, or find his own way out in the world. The next day, Jeremiah lied about his age and joined the United States Army.

  When Jeremiah arrived on Howard University’s campus in the fall of 1952, he was twenty years old, a bit older and much wiser than most other freshmen. He was among the first of the servicemen returning from Korea to continue their education on the GI Bill. He and the others honored an unspoken agreement not to congregate together or disc
uss their war experiences. When he saw another former soldier, who were always recognizable by a slight flatness in their gazes, Jeremiah nodded but kept going. They did the same.

  He had been on campus for five days when he spotted Gillian. She was standing near the biology building, standing erect in a crowd of giggling girls. Gillian was the only one not giggling. She was gazing at some spot outside the group—Jeremiah couldn’t tell what. There was a small, sardonic smile on her face. It occurred to him that she was the leader of this group and they vied for her attention. He suspected that she parceled out her attention in bits or not at all.

  He was about fifty feet away, strolling toward the biology building for his one o’clock class, when she turned to look at him. Her eyes were black, in sharp contrast to her pale-honey skin. Her dark hair fell in a straight curtain down her back, and she wore a straight skirt and a cashmere V-neck sweater that emphasized her curves. She reminded him of the women he had known in Seoul. The shared the same confidence and held themselves apart from emotional entanglement with Jeremiah, as if they knew they would be hurt if he got too close.

  Jeremiah held her gaze until he passed her to enter the building. Just before he pulled open the door, he turned to see if she was still watching him. She was, with one of her eyebrows raised a bit. The smile still played on her lips. He was laughing at him, mocking him for turning back. This made him smile.

  It was not love at first sight. Jeremiah found himself in demand among coeds, and he had no plans to limit himself to just one, however shiny her hair and devilish her smile. He made his lustful way through the entire chapter of Sigma Mu Beta sorority and was working his way through their arch rival, the Thetas, before he spoke one word to Gillian. She was not a sorority girl, and since these girls had been his initial focus (they were well organized, making for easy targets), it was three months before he had the opportunity to meet Gillian.

  It was just before Christmas break, and the crowds on campus were thinning out as students went home to families in and outside the Washington, D.C. area. Jeremiah had no plans to leave, since there was no home to return to. Instead, he intended to find an apartment off-campus where he could entertain his conquests with more privacy. He would also need a part-time job to pay the rent. After his first semester, he had decided that studying was overrated and he dropped his biology classes in favor of history classes that came easy to him. He’d always had a mind for dates and stories, and history was nothing if not a collection of stories. He considered economics, but he decided that he had learned all he needed to know about commerce at the orphanage.

  Switching to a history major gave him more time to pursue young women, many of them fresh from high-school cotillions in their small Southern hometowns. He liked these small-town girls best. They were the most impressed by his fabricated war stories. Having his own apartment would only help him sweet-talk these innocent young girls (who were later not so innocent), and he was on a mission.

  He was walking across campus, intent on finding a newspaper with local real estate listings when he saw her. She was sitting on a bench on the quad, wrapped in a heavy winter coat to fight off the forty-degree chill that drove most everyone else inside even though the sun offered a bit of warmth. She wore no hat and her hair rustled loose in the wind, strands flying their own way at random. He noticed that she wore black wool pants under her coat, a rarity for women on campus, who wore skirts and full makeup whenever they were seen in public. She was reading a book that was too small and narrow to be a textbook. He sat next to her on the bench and she looked up.

  He offered his most charming smile and waited for her to respond. She watched him smile for a long while, a slight frown on her face. He took her silence as an invitation to speak and tried not to be dismayed by the fact that she did not seem the least bit charmed.

  “I’m Jeremiah.” This had been his simple, standard opening approach to his college conquests. He thought it made him seem older and more mysterious than his younger competition, who stuttered and gave away their intention before they spoke a word. This approach had worked. First, the young women returned his smile. Then they took the hand he offered, and he held their soft hands just a few beats too long. It was enough.

  But Gillian ignored his hand and didn’t smile.

  “I know who you are.”

  His smile broadened. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He paused to offer her the opportunity to banter back. She remained silent.

  “You’re Gillian, right?”

  Although they had never met, Jeremiah had made it his business to find out all he could about her. She was studying to be a nurse, a bookworm who managed to be one of the most popular—and least attainable—women on campus. For that first semester, Jeremiah was quite busy with his sorority girls, but he always knew that he and Gillian would cross paths.

  No one on campus seemed to know much about Gillian’s family, only that she had a sister who was much younger and that she still lived in her hometown, Baltimore, commuting in a shiny 1949 Ford sedan rather than living in a dorm. This lack of a clear pedigree bothered the class-conscious crowd that was desperate to have Gillian as one of their own. They loved her pale skin and long hair, but her refusal to play the Who-Are-You game frustrated them. Jeremiah, who had no interest in such things, having no pedigree of his own, suspected that this was how Gillian kept herself aloof from the crowd.

  He thought she would be impressed by his efforts to find out about her.

  “Why are you asking me my name when you clearly already know it?” she snapped at him and looked back down at her book. He tried to see the cover, but she held it so he couldn’t read the title.

  Her coldness annoyed him, but he was not one to shy away from a challenge.

  “Just trying to be friendly. You should try it sometime.” He said this in a mild, teasing tone and sat down on the bench next to her. She moved as far away from him as was possible.

  They sat there for a while, she pretending to read, he pretending to be unbothered by her reticence. She exhaled a heavy sigh, closed the book and put it into her bag.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you being nice to me? Why should I be nice to you?”

  He didn’t care for the emphasis she placed on “you.” He also didn’t have an answer to her direct question, which felt more like an accusation. Jeremiah’s specialty was seduction, and one of his rules was the less talking, the better.

  He blushed and felt something unfamiliar—confusion. Jeremiah had been to war (sort of), had suffered terrible abuse in an orphanage (depending on your definition of abuse), and was struggling to put himself through college (struggle is a relative concept). He did not blush.

  Seeing the pink in his cheeks was what got Gillian to smile. Jeremiah was unable to think of a comeback that would salvage his dignity, so he stood up and left without another word.

  One thing Jeremiah did not do was lie to himself. He knew that Gillian’s rejection of his charms, her apparent lack of interest in him, was not without cause. He did not placate himself by deciding she was in some way deficient. She was the first woman he had met who saw through his act, who saw weakness where most others saw strength. And he knew she was right. Why should she be nice to him? He had proven himself unworthy of her attentions by approaching her as if she were just another conquest. She deserved more, and he knew it.

  He was prepared to be honest with himself, but he had no intention of changing. Weighing his options, he decided that Gillian, however beautiful, however intriguing, could not be his. She understood him, without even knowing him, and that was a problem. Jeremiah did not want to be understood. He wanted to have fun while he still could, before he was forced, by age or by circumstance, to be responsible.

  More than three years went by before he and Gillian spoke again.

  * * *

  By April of 1956, Jeremiah and Gillian’s class was preparing to graduate from Howard University. She was con
sidered the best nursing student in her class, and he was known, once again, as the man who could get you whatever you needed. He didn’t deal in contraband, since college students had access to the cigarettes and liquor that orphans did not. Jeremiah dealt in desire and weakness: the desire for academic success and the mental weakness that made this impossible for some.

  He had discovered that the college was full of the progeny of the growing black bourgeoisie, the sons of teachers and businessmen who were expected to go on to be doctors and lawyers. It was their birthright. They were the talented tenth that W.E.B. DuBois believed would lead the black masses. They had vast economic resources, relative to the general black population, and impeccable social standing.

  There was just one catch. Many of them, Jeremiah realized, were just plain dumb. No one knew better than he that money and class can’t buy intelligence. But someone had forgotten to let the bourgeois progeny in on this secret. So they floundered in their classes and risked both expulsion and social humiliation until Jeremiah came along. He was the savior they could not acknowledge, and they paid him for it. He wrote their papers, helped them cheat on tests, and crafted their presentations. He had a natural ability in many subjects, and he was not stingy about sharing it. As his customers’ grades rose from below average to exceptional, Jeremiah’s reputation grew, along with his savings.

  This lasted until Jeremiah, and many of his customers, were due to graduate the next month. Jeremiah didn’t have enough fingers to count the men who would be graduating because of him. If he had placed ads in the newspaper, he would have emphasized his ninety-nine percent success rate. It was the one percent that got him into trouble.

  Jon Johnson was a student who was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He looked the part of the privileged, and he spoke the part as well. He told people that his family was descended from Frederick Douglass, and he earned a solid reputation around campus based on his famous ancestor. Jeremiah alone knew this was a lie. He had written a research paper on Frederick Douglass for Jon just three months ago, and he supposed that if Frederick Douglass was Jon’s great-great-grandfather, he would know something about him.