“All right, Mother. I’ll take you home.”
One evening in our room, I told Lydia I felt sorry for our grandmother. She didn’t have any old-lady friends to hang with, except Miss Delores.
“That’s because Nana’s a bitch.”
“Lydia!”
My sister put a hand to her mouth. She raised her eyebrows.
“Oops. Did I say that out loud?”
“You shouldn’t talk that way. It’s not nice.”
“No, it’s not. See how guilty I look?” Lydia crossed her eyes, and I tried not to giggle.
“Baby, you know Nana doesn’t count Miss Delores. Claire Prejean Garfield would rather be stranded on a desert island than be friends with her dark-skinned maid. And that’s why nobody likes her.”
“Lydia, don’t say that. She’s not perfect—”
“That’s an understatement—”
“—but Nana still needs love.”
“Baby, your heart is too big. You have to learn to be a little colder.”
* * *
Lydia didn’t point out the change in my mother’s schedule, that Mama not only picked up Lydia and me from our different schools, she dropped us off in the mornings, too. That Mama didn’t dress up in her stylish, feminine clothes on early weekday mornings, tapping around in the kitchen in the heels that made her inches taller. There was no big leather purse filled with folders or student papers. It took me an entire week to notice that she was wearing tracksuits in shades of blue or pink and designer tennis shoes that kept her feet close to the ground instead. When I asked why was she dressed so casually—was she teaching physical education now?—she told me she had decided she was tired of teaching those little badass kids at Wells-Barnett. They had worked her nerves for years, and it’s not like she needed the money. Between Daddy’s practice and his moonlighting at the hospital, there was more than enough, and besides, she had a family to see about.
I didn’t challenge my mother’s change of heart. It made sense to me that she’d want to stay home in more comfortable clothes and read the books she wanted, ones that weren’t written for third graders. Maybe she’d lost the excitement for the smell of chalk and the sound of high, needy voices. I could understand, because I’d lost my desire for school, too, ever since that day Cecily had sat beside me on the steps and told me she couldn’t be my friend anymore. After that, I’d brought a sack lunch to school and eaten it while locked in a bathroom stall. That way, I wouldn’t have to look at Cecily and her crew.
I didn’t regain any enthusiasm when I enrolled at Braithwaite Friends. There were only twelve other Black students in the entire upper school—what they called the sophomore, junior, and senior grades. If I hadn’t had Lydia back, I don’t know what I would have done, because it was lonely at Braithwaite Friends. Really lonely. At Toomer, I’d been popular for all of two months, but at least everybody there was like me. The only white person at Toomer had been the art instructor. In her office she’d hung prints by Romare Bearden and Elizabeth Catlett. Braithwaite Friends was not just in another part of the City. It seemed to occupy a minuscule country all its own, one where there were no combinations on the lockers or padlocks because it was assumed that the students didn’t steal. The cafeteria was called the “dining room,” and the options were varied and delicious, not like the single, processed meal at Toomer that you either had to eat or go hungry. There were three kinds of soups. A salad bar with raw, bright vegetables and both creamy and vinaigrette dressings. Hot entrees were made to order, and if you were vegetarian someone in the kitchen came up with a creative concoction and put parsley on the side of the plate.
It was hard to figure out the financial or social pecking order at Braithwaite Friends. Nobody seemed to be an outcast, and nobody had bad teeth, either. There were straight teeth or braces in these kids’ mouths. On their bodies, neat, clean clothes, but nothing too stylish or ostentatious. Someone who looked like a nerd might have lots of friends and you’d find out that his father had given him a Mercedes for his sixteenth birthday. Mama had told me to seek out the Black kids. Undoubtedly, they would be lonely, too, but the twelve others in my tribe looked at me blankly whenever I offered my special, colored-person smile, which communicated that we were in this integration thing together. In the dining room if I put my tray down next to someone Black, they would rise and relocate at another table, sitting down in a sea of whiteness. The Black girls were the worst: none of them knew how to fix their hair. Besides me, every single girl relaxed, but didn’t grease at all. Their dry edges looked so broken and defeated.
After a month at Braithwaite Friends, only my teachers had made the place bearable. I’d never known teachers who asked for kids’ opinions and discussed ideas with them instead of telling us what we should think.
Ms. Rogers was my literature teacher. She was about thirty, with a short brown bob. Like the other teachers, she was usually casual, dressing in khakis and button-down shirts. On the rare days that she wore a dress with her flat shoes, students would ask why was she so fancy? Did she have a date that night? And she would smile and tuck a strand of hair behind an ear. Though she kept insisting I call her by her first name, I refused, and when I compromised and called her “Miss Angela,” she’d tease me and look behind her, as if I was talking to someone else. Her class was my favorite, though.
“What about these sonnets?” Ms. Rogers asked. “Let me know what’s up!”
In the front row, Sunshine Coleman raised her hand.
“In the Dark Lady poems, I’ve noticed Shakespeare draws a correlation between light as good and dark as evil.”
“So great! Really profound! Anyone else? Anyone?” Ms. Rogers gave me the encouraging teacher eyeball, and I scooted down in my chair. “So we’ve talked about theme and subject. But what about the way Shakespeare writes a poem? What about his rhythm and meter?”
Lizbet Welch raised her hand. Only twelve, she was the tenth-grade genius freak. She didn’t even have boobs yet. “The iambic pentameter is obvious. But when one scans the poem”—she looked around defensively—“um, the stresses tend to occur with his most vivid imagery.”
“Yes!” our teacher exclaimed. “That’s exactly right! Astounding!”
In the row in front of me, Amber Tuttlefield raised her hand. She and I were in another class together, American History, along with Chris Tate. He was the Black guy who acted like her boyfriend. Whenever he looked Amber’s way, his face was adoring as Amber raked her fingers through her blond hair. It fell to her tailbone, and sometimes she’d fling the hair back and it would land on my desk.
“I think this whole discussion is really mean and it makes me sad.”
“‘Mean’ how?” Ms. Rogers asked. “Expound, please.”
“Like, why does everything have to be about Black and white or whatever, when true love sees no color?”
“Amber, that is certainly some insightful food for thought. Thank you for sharing your profound feelings.” Ms. Rogers held her hand to her chest in the approximate location of her heart.
At the end of class, I stayed in my desk watching Chris whispering in Amber’s ear.
She laughed, pushing his arm. “You’re such a fucker!”
Ms. Rogers looked up from her desk, frowning. A few beats passed, and then she returned to the papers on her desk. The teachers at my new school were serious pushovers. They let these rich white kids call them by their first names and when a student cursed they didn’t even glance over their shoulder in case an adult overheard. At Toomer, if a teacher heard you cursing, it was an automatic suspension.
Amber rose. When she walked in front of Chris, he stepped in reverse a few paces. Between his fingers there was a piece of paper. He dropped it on my desk then ran after Amber.
There were no buses after school. Everybody waited for their rides home. Chris and a group of white boys kicked a cloth ball among them, bumping into the other kids waiting for their rides. A few of the kids looked annoyed, but most laughed. It was finally Friday. Being
an asshole was for the beginning of the week. Chris almost fell backward, but Amber rushed over and grabbed hold of his upper arm. She shouted, “Up!” as she pushed. He located his balance, smiling into her eyes, and her cheeks turned dark pink. Watching them, a stitch formed in my side, but I arranged my face into a pleasant façade. Mama had told me to exhibit my best behavior at this school. Don’t drop my guard and don’t lose my temper, because if anything bad happened those white kids would stick together, so I pretended joy at witnessing Chris and Amber opening their eyes wide, apparently shocked at the miracle of Friday afternoon.
Mama inched the station wagon forward in the queue of cars, honking the horn. Lydia opened the car door.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “Did you have a good day?”
On the grass, Chris and Amber were talking. A wind blew, and she flicked her blond hair out of her face. The other boys restarted the game without him.
* * *
I took a week, studying the paper Chris had slipped me. There was no name, but there was a phone number, and a handwritten message: You’re so fine and I want to get with you!
I looked for ciphers in those nine words. Was this simply an overture of friendship? And why, when Chris had behaved like the rest of the unfriendly Black kids in this school to my face? Monday morning, I took my time finding an outfit and decided on the one that I’d worn the previous fall, when Mama and I had visited the counselor. My kilt and special sweater with my penny loafers. When I walked into Ms. Rogers’s classroom, Chris’s expression didn’t register that I looked amazing, which was disappointing. But at the end of the lesson he gave me a quick wink and I decided that I would take a chance.
Still, I waited to call him, until an evening after dinner when everyone would be occupied. My father was at the hospital, moonlighting. My mother and my aunt were sitting in the kitchen, talking. Aunt Diane had left Veronica at home with her husband to let him know that it was a new day. Men should be responsible for childcare, too. My sister was in the office studying, and I tiptoed upstairs like a sneak thief. I dragged the hall phone by its long cord into my bedroom and shut the door. From underneath my pillow, I pulled out note cards with conversation starters, and placed them on my comforter: I enjoy listening to public radio and Zora Neale Hurston is my favorite author and Unless it’s summer, my mother doesn’t let me eat processed foods.
The lady on the other line was quiet-voiced. “Tate residence.”
“Hello, this is Miss Ailey Garfield. I’m calling for Mr. Christopher Tate. May I speak to him, please?”
“One moment.”
A series of clicks, and then another quiet-voiced lady.
“This is Camille Tate.”
“Hello, this is Miss Ailey Garfield. May I speak to Mr. Christopher Tate, please?”
“Oh, hello, Ailey! This is Mrs. Tate.”
“Um . . . hello, Mrs. Tate, ma’am. How are you?”
“I’m well, Ailey. And yourself?”
“I’m fine, ma’am. Did you have a good day?”
“I had a very good day, dear, and thank you for asking! Chris said you had impeccable manners. I see he was right, and what a lovely surprise. So many young people these days are so rude.”
I talked with Mrs. Tate, running through my polite arsenal, but it was exhausting. There were no openings to broach the starters I’d laid out on the bed. By the time Chris came to the phone, I didn’t know if I had any more to give.
“Hey, girl. Why’d you take so long to call me? Damn.”
“Well, you know.”
“Well, you know,” he repeated, in a high, girlish voice.
“You’re so crazy.”
We made plans to meet behind the lower school building—the younger kids left thirty minutes earlier—at two thirty on Tuesday, one of the days Amber left early for her three-hour-long piano lessons, Chris said.
If he wanted to make a change, he shouldn’t be talking about his current girlfriend, but I put that out of my mind. I had other problems, such as inventing a plausible lie to fool my mother.
The afternoon of our rendezvous it was chilly out. I wore two extra T-shirts under my sweater, but then I was overheated. I took off my down coat, laid it on the ground, and sat with my book bag beside me. I’d told my mother there was a study group for biology that met after classes. I felt no shame. Technically, I was telling the truth, since I’d used my half hour after school let out to study.
After a few minutes, Chris showed. “What’cha doing sitting on the ground?”
“Waiting on you. Take a load off.”
“You talk so funny, Ailey.”
His skin was smooth: so far, he’d escaped acne. His hair cut low and neatly brushed. He rested his head against the bricks of the building, regaling me with tales of that stupid cloth ball game. He’d wanted to attend a public school with a real soccer team, but his parents had vetoed that.
“But at least now I have a reason to like it here,” Chris said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You, silly.”
Walking through the halls and holding hands, so that people witnessed our love. Stopping every now and then to kiss. That’s how I pictured us.
“Girl, when I saw you in class, I was like, who is that? She’s so fine. And you don’t even care what the white kids say about you.”
I wondered what they said about me, but I wanted to keep up my cool impression.
“Not really.”
He swiveled his head, looking for eavesdroppers. “But you know, fuck these honkies, right?”
“Sure, I guess.”
He gave me a quick peck on the lips. I touched his face, but he quickly grabbed my hand. We went back to talking about that stupid cloth ball game, but I caught something about his father.
“. . . I never see him,” Chris said. “He’s always at the hospital.”
“Is he a doctor?”
“Yeah, a surgeon.”
“My daddy’s a doctor, too. He’s in general practice, but he works emergency. I only see him at dinnertime about three times a week.”
“We don’t even see mine then.”
I gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze. He squeezed back.
* * *
“Hey, Mama? I’m going out tonight, okay?” Lydia scraped at a soggy vanilla wafer in her dish of banana pudding.
“Going where?”
“To the preseason game with one of my sorors. I can give you her number so you can talk to her.”
There were the three of us that night. Two sisters and a mother at the table, lingering. We used our spoons to pick at the remains of our dessert. We were full, but sugar beckoned.
“No, I don’t think so. Coco’s not here to chaperone.” Mama rose from the table and when she returned from the kitchen, she carried foil. She covered the pudding dish, pressing around the edges.
“So no, just like that?”
“You need to be studying.”
“I can go out on a Saturday night if I want to. I’m almost twenty-two years old, Mama.”
My mother turned to me. “Ailey, if you don’t stop looking in grown folks’ mouths when they’re talking. Go do your homework.”
“I did it yesterday. I’m finished.”
“Ailey Pearl Garfield, did you hear what I said? I’m not playing with you!”
Upstairs, I lay on my big sister’s bed, reading. On the transistor radio, the preseason game was on: Mecca was losing to Albany State: “And it’s GOOD!”
I was dozing, when I felt Lydia lie down beside me. We moved into our old position, my head resting against her feet.
“Lydia, where’s Dante?”
“You can’t tell anybody I told you. It has to be our secret. Do you promise, Ailey?”
She nudged at me until I sat up. I promised her and she told me she’d gotten in trouble last year. She’d been hanging out with a bad crew and, well, she’d started using drugs.
“For real?” I looked down at her comforter, focusing on the se
ashells and waves. I didn’t want her to see my face. The shock there and the disappointment. I didn’t want her to be ashamed.
“That’s why Mama came south to see about me. She put me in a rehab center so I could get better. So I could get off the drugs.”
“But what about Dante? You still didn’t tell me what happened with y’all.”
“We broke up. We’re not together anymore.”
“But, like, maybe y’all can get back together. If you had a fight, you could say you’re sorry and he could say he’s sorry—”
“No, baby. That’s over.”
“Oh. Okay. Are you sad?”
“Yeah, baby, I am. I’m real, real sad. That’s why I don’t want to talk about Dante. It just makes me want to cry.”
Lydia had told me a serious secret; it was only right that I offered one in return. For seconds, I considered telling her about Gandee, what he had done to me in the bathtub when I was little. How he’d threatened to kill my sisters and mother, and then me, if I ever told anybody. And even though Lydia was my best friend, she was like a second mother to me. I didn’t want Lydia to think less of me, to decide that Gandee had made me something other than the good girl she thought I was.
Instead, I confessed to Lydia about Chris. That I’d been meeting him behind the upper school on the days I told Mama that I was studying late. He already had a girlfriend, and I knew I should feel guilty that he was two-timing, but I didn’t. Because Amber was that white girl in my class that I’d told Lydia about, the one who flipped her hair on my desk.
“You don’t have anything to feel sorry for,” Lydia said. “I mean, no, it’s not the best situation, but be honest. He probably was with that white girl because there weren’t any Black girls. At least not any who don’t have jacked-up perms. Remember how Coco used to complain about that school? There weren’t but six Black kids there.”
“It’s thirteen of us now.”
“Whoa-dee-whoa, look at all them Negroes! Thirteen is a race riot!”
I laughed and touched her hand. “You so silly, Lydia!”
“Baby, think about it. That Chris guy just wants a girlfriend who looks like him, and then here you come, all beautiful and brown and super cool. And you know how to fix your hair. How could he resist all this?”
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 10