The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  In April of senior year, a large blue-and-gold envelope came in the mail, addressed to “Miss Ailey P. Garfield.” On the front, an encircled heart. A motto curved at the top and bottom: “My Whole Heart for the Lord.”

  Inside the envelope, a letter stating that Routledge College was delighted to accept me to the class of 1995. On a separate sheet, a list of what the college deemed as “necessary” items: notebooks, typewriter or word processor, ballpoint pens, towels, twin sheets, twin mattress pad, twin comforter. Finally, there was a list of required clothing for female students, such as, I needed to bring “appropriately modest attire for everyday wear,” a formal gown, a semiformal gown, dark heels, and at least one dress suitable for mandatory chapel, also “appropriately modest.”

  “What kind of sexist crap is this?” I asked.

  Mama cackled. “I hope you enjoy spending four years in the late nineteenth century. Get your mind right, because if you think President Bush is conservative, you ain’t seen nothing till you go to Routledge.” She and I were in my father’s office, sitting on the dilapidated leather couch, folding laundry. Daddy was in the roller chair, holding his empty pipe.

  “Don’t scare the child,” he said. “Our alma mater isn’t so bad. I have very fond memories, particularly of February 1966. Yes, indeed.”

  “Stop being naughty in front of the baby,” she said. “And when we were there, it was the women they bothered. The men could do whatever they wanted. Routledge hasn’t changed that ‘appropriately modest’ shit since we went there.”

  “And what’s chapel?” I asked. “And why do I need a dress for it?”

  “Chapel is church, baby,” she said.

  “But I’m an atheist. That’s why I don’t go to church.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re just too lazy to get up on Sunday. There are no Black atheists.”

  “That’s not true, Mama.”

  “All right, then, name me one, since there’re so many.”

  When I looked to my father, he shook his head so slightly, I almost missed it. It was a marital pact, his pretending a devout, religious belief and my mother pretending he wasn’t a fraud.

  “See, Ailey, you can’t name even one,” she said.

  “I could if this wasn’t a Christian Negro pop quiz.”

  “Watch that tone, Ailey Pearl. Remain graceful in defeat.”

  * * *

  My final rendezvous with Chris occurred on the floor of his basement, the week before high school graduation. He lay on top of me, drowsy, and told me he was going to miss me so much. I kissed him, saying that was all right. The summer was only two months, but after all, we’d see each other in the fall. And after our first year of college, maybe we could get an apartment together.

  That’s when Chris told me he wasn’t going to Routledge. He’d been accepted to Princeton.

  I shifted my hips, pushing him off. “You didn’t tell me you were applying to other schools. Did you even send an application to Routledge?”

  “Ailey, I’m sorry. But my dad went to Princeton. He was expecting me to go.”

  “So what are we supposed to do now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe . . . we should break up?”

  I shifted to face him. “What?”

  “I mean, I don’t really know if I can do long-distance.”

  “You couldn’t tell me this before you got laid?”

  “I guess . . . I wanted us to have a good time. You know, one last time.”

  “Negro, give me a break! You came in, like, seventy-seven seconds! You’re the worst lay ever.”

  “You don’t have to be so mean, Ailey.”

  “You’re the one who fucked me and then dumped me! You lying asshole!”

  I kept my voice down so Mrs. Tate wouldn’t hear me through the vents. That way, she could pretend she didn’t know that, instead of listening to CDs on the stereo, we had sex on her basement floor. And sometimes on top of her washing machine.

  For weeks afterward, I was huffy with Mama, though I didn’t inform her of my breakup with Chris. I’d manipulated her into approving of my relationship with Chris, but somehow I was angry at her, as if it were actually her fault that I’d been with him. I blamed her for his bad behavior. If she’d had one of her dreams about Chris, he wouldn’t have made a fool of me. But she didn’t fuss at me or tell me to mind my home training. She didn’t ask about the whereabouts of Chris, only offering at dinner that being a young person was so hard. We were alone at the table, the night before our Chicasetta journey. She went to the kitchen and brought out a huge slice of pie, setting it before me. Then she poured me a full cup of coffee and topped it off with cream. I was a young woman, she told me. I’d probably done all of my growing.

  The next morning, the back of the station wagon was packed to capacity, with my new comforter and pillows for my dorm room, and sacks full of granola bars and tiny boxes of raisins. Most of my books would occupy Uncle Root’s downstairs library. Mama asked, had I remembered to pack my birth control pills? Because she wasn’t raising any more children.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not even sexually active.”

  She released huffs of laughter. “Child, please. I found those pills three months ago.”

  I was so embarrassed, I didn’t speak for an hour after we began our drive. She let me listen to National Public Radio instead of her Aretha mixtape, and she didn’t keep talking when I pulled out a book. But then we passed the Peach Butt in South Carolina, and the old excitement hit me. I put aside my reading, and she told unedited versions of stories I’d heard as a little girl. We gossiped about relatives in Chicasetta: that Uncle Norman never had been married twice; that fiction had been created to explain my cousin Lee Curtis, who was an “outside” child. When Aunt Barbara-Pam had learned of L.C.’s existence, she’d shown up to the mistress’s house and shouted through the door, threatening to cut her throat. For a fortnight, until my uncle received his paycheck from his second job, he’d worn the clothes his wife had ruined with splatters of bleach.

  At the turnoff on Highway 441, Mama turned in the direction of Madison. She pulled into the gas station, and when she finished pumping, she knocked on my window and asked, did I want to drive? It was mostly open road from there on, she said, and I had my driver’s license, so unless I did something stupid, I wouldn’t kill us. We weren’t in the old station wagon anymore. It finally had died, back in March. My mother had cried a week over her car, then dried her tears and bought a used Volvo, identical to my aunt’s.

  When I drove up to the house off County Line Road, I was proud. My elders gave looks of surprise when I opened the driver’s door. Uncle Root came out into the yard to hug me, and I missed the days when he had carried me in his arms.

  That summer, my mother joined me in Chicasetta. She had taught my father to make his own breakfast: a bowl of oatmeal with skim milk and one patty of her homemade turkey sausage. And she had frozen his dinners. He would be fine for eight weeks.

  Sitting on my granny’s porch, peeling tomatoes and peaches, I bristled at the circle of elders. They asked me what ailed me, but I didn’t tell them I was lonely. Even Boukie would have been welcome company. The summer before my senior year, he’d shown at my granny’s house; to my surprise, Boukie had apologized for his behavior that night at the creek. He shouldn’t have tried to do me wrong. And he informed me he’d started attending Mt. Calvary every Sunday.

  But now Boukie was a settled man. He and Rhonda were living together and expecting a baby. As for David, he had an internship with a law firm in Atlanta and shared an apartment with two other students at Morehouse. And my granny told me he and that girl were still keeping company. David appeared at the family reunion, though, heading to the picnic table where the old man and I sat.

  David was friendly with me, asking, how was I doing? And was I excited for college? I refused to answer his overtures, remembering how he’d moved on from me after pretending to be so in love. I was hoping he wou
ld leave the reunion, but he stayed. He and the old man talked and laughed, hitting the table in their mirth, while I sulked at their brother-man magic.

  When Uncle Root rose, and said it was time for the three of us to visit his pecan tree, I told him I didn’t feel like it. I wasn’t finished with my barbecue. The two of them could go ahead without me.

  We Sing Your Praises High

  At the age of fifteen, Uncle Root had enrolled in Routledge College because he’d had no other choice for education in his town: the segregated school for Negroes at Red Mound Church only had gone to eighth grade. This was the excuse Big Thom gave him, at least, but truly his third child had confounded his white father.

  First off, the boy was mean: he barely spoke to Big Thom, and when he did, it was only to ask for money. And Uncle Root had been discovered naked in the bushes with Negro girls (who also were naked). It was a good thing Uncle Root was a fast runner; otherwise, he would have caught more than one beating from an angry father. More than that, it was only dumb luck nobody had gotten pregnant. And Uncle Root was getting into fights with white boys, too, taunting them with big words. His father was constantly having to pass out cash and threats to keep his Negro son alive.

  So Big Thom sent Uncle Root up the road to Routledge College, where his love of books was nurtured. There, in a history class taught by a tall, thin man, the boy read The Souls of Black Folk for the first time.

  “Do you have any more books by that Du Bois fellow?” he asked.

  “A few,” his professor told him. “But be careful with them.”

  Though only teenagers when they met, Aunt Olivia had calmed Uncle Root down. After they graduated college, they traveled together to the City for graduate school. There, they married young. Study calmed Uncle Root further, and he was a dedicated student at Mecca University. He finished his master’s and doctorate in history in record time. It had been easy, he would say, researching and writing about the freed slaves who’d migrated to the City after the Civil War. Aunt Olivia was a perfectionist—it had taken her a bit longer to finish her dissertation on the free Negro women of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Then Uncle Root took her back south to Chicasetta.

  Uncle Root and Aunt Olivia taught at Red Mound Church School in Chicasetta, and it seemed that he was a changed man. But shortly thereafter, his bad temperament reappeared when Uncle Root took his frustrations with the conditions at Red Mound Church School to the white members of the Chicasetta board of education. Uncle Root was furious that, while the board finally had allocated a tiny budget for his school, during harvest times the three rich planters in town—including Tommy Jr.—would send their foremen to the school to collect the Negro children to work in their fields. And the textbooks for Red Mound were in horrible shape. The used books were years out of date, pages always were missing, and sometimes the white students who had previously used them had scrawled “nigger” and “jungle monkey” and other epithets inside. After that contentious meeting, Tommy Jr., a member of the board, told his brother it was time for him to leave town. And that evening, Tommy Jr. sat on the porch of the rented house where his brother and his wife lived. The white man had a shotgun across his lap, in case one of the members of the board had friends among the Franklins.

  After Uncle Root and Aunt Olivia left Chicasetta, they decided it was time to teach on the college level. Of course, they couldn’t find employment at white universities. White colleges didn’t hire Negroes in those days, and though Uncle Root could pass, his dark brown wife could not. But at each Negro college where the couple taught, Uncle Root had a habit of arguing with his department chair and then quitting his job on a dime. There had been Hampton Institute in Virginia, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and the Elizabeth City State Colored Normal School in North Carolina. At that rate, they were going to run out of Negro institutions.

  When the joint offer came from Routledge College in 1938, Aunt Olivia was thrilled, but barely a month in, her man began grumbling. That time was different, however. The morning he told Aunt Olivia he was planning to quit his teaching job, and she warned him she wasn’t going to pack up again. Her husband didn’t believe her. He performed his tried-and-true maneuver of persuasion, leaning in to kiss that place on her neck—nudging her crinkly hair to the side—but she shoved him away.

  “Don’t you dare touch me.”

  In case he didn’t get the hint, Aunt Olivia locked him out of their bedroom in their two-room campus apartment. This was a sobering moment for her young husband. After four days of his sleeping on the hard settee in their front room and his desperate knocking on their bedroom door in the wee hours, his wife served her husband breakfast. There was the excellent bread that the cooks in the campus refectory baked each day, and the home-cured ham and peach preserves her sister-in-law had given them on their last trip to Chicasetta.

  She poured Uncle Root’s coffee, and then she asked, had he heard about the materials in the college archives? But her husband sulked; he was feeling neglected and lonely.

  “Such as?” he asked, finally.

  “You’re not acting very nice. I don’t know if I should tell you what I found.”

  “Olivia, please don’t toy with my affections.”

  “Just go over there and see.”

  She let Uncle Root back in their bedroom, but she made him do his own research. It took months of almost daily visits to Mr. Temple, the college librarian, for Uncle Root to gain access to the college archives. And it was another two weeks before he found a letter, sent in 1901, back when Dr. Du Bois had taught at Atlanta University. In those years, the great scholar’s travels through the sometimes-dangerous southern countryside had landed him at the Georgia Institute for Colored Girls—the original name of Routledge College.

  Dr. Du Bois had sent the principal of the school a note of thanks: My dear Mrs. Routledge, I am so grateful for your warm hospitality during my brief visit. It was an honor to witness your important work of educating your girls. The memory is fond, for I know that you share my devotion to our people and understand the grave responsibilities of Negro women. You are the salvation of our Race, for without women like you, our people surely would perish. Yours very truly, W. E. B. Du Bois.

  That short note was enough to keep Uncle Root in Georgia. Whenever he needed encouragement, whenever he required a reminder of why he worked for very little pay and even less appreciation at this small college out in the Georgia countryside, he would return to the archives to examine that brief collection of sentences.

  * * *

  For my birthday, my mother gave me a surprise: my own car, a red hatchback with fifty thousand miles on the odometer. She hadn’t wrapped a huge bow around it. There was no fanfare when Uncle Norman drove it into the yard, but I did a hip-swiveling dance and wrapped my arm around her shoulders and told her how happy I was, while she told me, calm on down. And I wiggled some more when I saw the brand-new CD player in the dash.

  “I don’t know what the young people are listening to these days,” she said. “You have to buy your own music or let me know.”

  She let me drive her to Routledge College in August, so she could settle me into the dormitory. She taped up my posters of Denzel Washington and Angela Davis and placed roach poison cartridges in the corners. A new purple comforter went on the bed with shams and a bed skirt to match, and my books overflowing my one shelf and stacked in the corner. She met my roommate, Keisha Evans, who was from Milledgeville and sat with Mama on the floor, the two of them talking like home folks until it was time for my mother to leave. Uncle Norman was coming soon to take her back to Chicasetta, but I made excuses for her to stay, suggesting that I drive us to the waffle place on the highway. Mama agreed, but as we were walking out the front door of the dorm, my uncle’s truck pulled up.

  “Oh, baby, I think that’s my cue! Give me a hug.” She clasped me briefly and climbed into the pickup. She waved, and then they drove off.

  Up in my dorm room, I sat on my fluffy purple comforter and
cried, and my roommate hugged me and assured me that everything would be fine.

  My initial days on campus were jarring. Routledge College occupied its own, tiny self-contained town of Thatcher, Georgia. The campus wasn’t even half the size of the farm my relatives rented, but with nearly one thousand students crowding into that small space. The only restaurant was the Rib Shack. The only shop, the bookstore; along with textbooks, it sold college and Greek paraphernalia, laundry detergent, stationery, feminine hygiene products, and personal toiletries, all at ridiculously high markups.

  Coming from a liberal private school, I was shocked to find out that the college motto, “My Whole Heart for the Lord,” was taken very seriously by some students. It was a rallying cry for Jesus freaks on campus, like my roommate, Keisha. Our first Sunday together, she rose at six thirty, turning her radio to the R & B station that switched to gospel on Sunday.

  I’d exaggerated to my mother; I wasn’t an atheist, but I didn’t believe in slobbering on God, and I hadn’t planned on attending chapel services, either. We were allowed two cuts a semester in order to attend our “home church” in the area. I’d intended on taking mine immediately and lying that I’d visited Red Mound. If closely questioned, I was prepared: I had jotted down scripture notes from summer services.

  I lifted my face off the pillow. “Hey. Um . . . Keisha? Darling?”

  “Good morning, Ailey! Praise God!” On her face was a patina of joy. Her pressed hair was out of the curlers and lay neatly next to her cheeks. Her unpainted complexion was a smooth cocoa brown, her figure recognizably devastating, even under the “modest” dress she wore.

  “Look, sweetie—”

  On the radio, CeCe Winans hit a celestial note, and my roommate caught the Holy Spirit. When she began jumping and clapping her hands, I knew sleep was fruitless.