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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  A week into the first semester, our dorm mother called a meeting in the lobby to air student concerns about the appalling conditions in our one-hundred-year-old dorm. In the evenings, the water in Routledge Hall bathrooms was fine, but in the mornings, it was rusty with unidentifiable clumps. There was no air-conditioning, and on each of the three floors, the ceilings were so high, window fans couldn’t push out the heat. Many of us had spotted rodents that were either medium-size mice or small rats, but no one wanted to get close enough to make sure.

  I stayed quiet, because already I had a reputation for being stuck-up, even though I hadn’t told anyone that my parents were alumni. But Roslyn “Roz” Fauntleroy didn’t worry about anyone thinking she suffered from superiority. She took to the floor of the lobby to carol her discontent.

  “I didn’t come to the sticks for this craziness,” Roz said. “I’m already not getting any financial aid—my daddy makes too much money for that welfare check they pass out. He’s not paying full tuition for me to dodge some rats.” Turning to our dorm mother, she squinted, a direct sign of insolence.

  Mrs. Stripling’s auburn wig tilted wearily over her eyebrows. “It’s called a Pell Grant, Roslyn. And you don’t have to shame our students in need.”

  “I’m not shaming anybody. I’m only telling y’all, my daddy is a lawyer. And he will sue this school if I get bit by whatever’s running around here.”

  After the meeting, Roz walked up to Keisha and me. She wanted to know, what did we think about this bullshit?

  “It’s a shame, shonuff.”

  Keisha looked down at the floor. She was in love with Jesus, and I waited for her to say that the body was God’s temple, and that included her mouth, thus, cursing was a violation of temple laws, but Keisha gave Roz a pass. I sighed in a bored way, pretending I was above this whole discussion. When I’d called my parents about the dorm problems, Daddy said he was passing the phone to Mama, who told me I could have attended Mecca University and stayed at home. But since I thought I was grown and I was so anxious to leave my parents, I shouldn’t let little things like vermin and some colorful water get in the way of my higher education. And please don’t forget to say “hey” to her old roommate, Mrs. Giles-Lipscomb. She was the college librarian now.

  A day after our dorm meeting, when Roz had asked to move into our room on the first floor, Keisha had argued our large room could hold another twin bed easily. I’d parried that Roz seemed very bossy and I’d left my mother at home, but Keisha had countered with an appeal to my guilt.

  “Ailey, that girl lives on the third floor, and there’s no air-conditioning! You know it’s too hot up there. It’s the Christian thing to do.”

  “Okay, but when you get tired of Roz’s mouth, don’t you come running to me. You tell it to Jesus. Ask Him to fix it.”

  Yet in our room, Roz would sometimes speak in whispers—one never knew who was listening at the door—and it was during those times that Keisha and I grasped that she wasn’t as tough as she seemed. In those moments she would draw us closer, tell us the secrets required for any true female friendship: Since Roz’s parents had divorced, her mother and she were struggling financially. They shared a one-bedroom apartment in southwest Atlanta. Whenever Roz visited, she slept on the let-out in the living room. And while it was true that her father was an attorney and that he made too much money for Roz to receive financial aid, that was only on paper. He paid for her tuition and her books but complained that his new family—with the woman he’d left Roz’s mother for—required too much money for him to cover the rest. So during the summers, Roz worked as a secretary. Her father’s grandmother had bought her a used car, but the rest was on Roz.

  Though Keisha’s early morning habits were annoying, she looked after Roz and me. She woke us early every morning before breakfast so we could study together. She was a social work major on scholarship. Roz was an English major who planned to be a lawyer. I was majoring in premed. I took my classes with the other premed freshmen, and only saw my roommates in our room, at meals, and on Fridays, when we returned to the chapel’s congregational space for the requisite Freshman Orientation.

  When Dr. Charlemagne Walters, the dean of students, lectured the freshmen in the college chapel, he told us what he thought to be the most salient facts about Routledge College. We were required to memorize everything. Dean Walters started his first lecture by giving us the background on the two founders of the institution, Mrs. Adeline Ruth Hutchinson Routledge, and her spinster sister, Judith Naomi Hutchinson. The latter was a deeply religious woman who had died four years after the Civil War, in 1869. Dean Walters told us that Adeline’s desire to start our college originally had begun with her sister’s idea for a school for Negro girls. That’s why even though Judith had passed away four years before the official founding of the college, her name was listed along with Adeline’s as a founder.

  When Dean Walters talked about the founders, he would pull out his handkerchief and dab his eyes.

  “Our people, our people! What a mighty race!”

  He told us the original mission of our college was to lead students to seek knowledge in a way that adhered to Christian values. The school motto was chiseled in the marble floor of the library, surrounded by a lapis lazuli Valentine’s Day heart, which represented that same muscle of Judith Hutchinson. We were never—ever—supposed to step on the heart. Yet what our Freshman Orientation professor could not explain, despite his copious knowledge of our college’s history, was why, in one hundred eighteen years, the board of trustees had never appointed a second female president of our college. The only woman who’d occupied that role had been Mrs. Routledge herself, but even then, she had called herself the “principal.”

  When I asked about the gendered redundancy of our college administration, Dean Walters paused and tilted his head to the side. He was a diminutive man, only a couple of inches taller than my mother, and he overenunciated every word.

  “Tell me this, Miss Garfield. Do you question why there has never been a female president of our great nation?”

  “Actually, I do, very much.”

  The students in the chapel gasped and looked back at me.

  “I see,” he said. “Miss Garfield, I don’t know why the board of trustees in their infinite wisdom selected these esteemed men to lead us. I just think it’s a coincidence they are all men.”

  Neither could Dean Walters answer why the institution had gone coed in 1922, eighteen months after Mrs. Routledge had died, and a year after her daughter had married Mr. Thierry De Saussure and then appointed him as the second leader of the school. He was the one who had begun calling himself “president,” and who had decided that the school would be called “Routledge College,” instead of “Georgia Institute for Colored Girls.” According to the official origin story, Mr. De Saussure thought that allowing male students to matriculate would increase enrollment, since the college was located in a remote part of Georgia.

  I raised my hand again.

  “Miss Garfield, I’m trying to get through this material by the end of class. What is your question?”

  “I went to the library and looked up old yearbooks.”

  Dean Walters perched on his toes. “Did you, now? Wonderful!”

  “Yes, sir, I did. When you gave us the handout to read, I thought I might do some more research.”

  “Well, that is simply fantastic!”

  “Thank you. And I counted the numbers of female and male students from 1922 to 1990, and what those numbers show is that Mr. De Saussure’s coed strategy has been a complete failure.”

  The students whispered.

  Roz poked me.

  Dean Walters came down on his heels. “That is simply not true.”

  “I’m sorry, but it is,” I said. “While the number of students rose from three hundred or so students in 1922 to almost a thousand in 1990, the percentage of male students has remained around nine and a half percent. So why didn’t one of the other presidents deci
de to have Routledge go back to an all-female school?”

  “Because we already have Spelman College in Atlanta and Bennett College in North Carolina, and those are colleges for African American women. Now let’s move on—”

  When I raised my hand again, he cut me off.

  “No, Miss Garfield. We have finished. We are through. I know you come from the City, so let me explain that down south, when an elder says, let’s move on, that means, Stop talking, young lady, because you aren’t offering anything important to the discussion. Do you understand, Miss Garfield?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Though I was the daughter of college alumni, I hadn’t yet told anyone. I didn’t want to sit in the “bourgie section” of Freshman Orientation, the first rows of chapel pews, where alumni’s kids clustered. They were referred to as “grandchildren,” since their parents had been formed in our college’s pulsing Negro womb. The bourgie section gave enthusiastic cosigning to Dean Walters, smiling with no irony when he referred to Routledge as “the Harvard of the South.” They already knew the words to the college hymn, “Dear Routledge, We Sing Your Praises High”; unlike me, they didn’t have to constantly look down at the cheat sheet throughout the song.

  Some other freshmen tried to buck Dean Walters’s indoctrination, such as Abdul Wilson, who walked around in red, black, and green outfits with matching knitted caps. He chewed on a long twig and insisting on calling out, “Hotep,” when he saw my roommates and me on campus. He got under Keisha’s skin—she’d reply that she blessed him in the name of Jesus, and switch right on past him.

  The day Dean Walters led us on the tour of Freedom Library, Abdul committed a horrible faux pas: he stepped on Judith Hutchinson’s lapis lazuli heart. We had started our tour in the basement, where there were twenty new computers that had been donated by an alumnus. We stood and admired the screens, and then we filed up the back steps into the dark and frightening stacks, where the books were kept, and where there were study carrels. Dean Walters told us there were three levels of books in the stacks, and more in the reading rooms. When we came out on the first floor, Abdul was at the end of the line, with my roommates and me. He deliberately walked into the middle of the lobby floor and stepped on the heart. Then he smiled.

  Mrs. Marie Giles-Lipscomb walked from behind the counter and began yelling. “What are you doing? Get off the heart! This is a sacred symbol! You might as well be stomping Jesus on the cross!” She gestured at the floor with both hands, but Abdul deliberately lifted a foot and put it right back on the heart.

  Our professor turned, saw the scene, and started yelling, too. Abdul stepped back several paces from the heart, but Dean Walters quickly followed, making sure that he stepped around the heart on his path. He stood very close to Abdul. Though he perched on his toes, he was too short to get into the younger man’s face. But his menacing words carried.

  “Boy, I see you smirking,” Dean Walters said. “But let me tell you, this is not a joke. That’s the last time you step on the heart. Do you hear me? You put any part of your body on that heart and I will expel you by the end of that day. I don’t care if you have a stroke near that heart, pass out, and accidentally fall on top of it. I will expel you. Now, you walk back over there to our librarian and you apologize for your ungentlemanly, rude behavior.”

  Abdul hurried over to Mrs. Giles-Lipscomb, who folded her arms at his approach. Whatever he said, he whispered it, because I couldn’t hear him. The librarian’s frown only softened by a few degrees, and as he kept whispering apologies, she gave a short nod. She turned and walked behind the counter. Abdul walked back to our class group.

  We continued on our tour, walking into the main reading room, where a velvet cord blocked off a large, framed sepia-toned photograph of Mrs. Routledge and Miss Hutchinson, our two founders. Though the women were sisters and dressed identically in long, dark dresses with full skirts, they looked nothing alike. One woman was very fair, the other very dark, but both women looked grim, as if somebody had told them something that ruined their day, moments before the picture was taken.

  As we filed from the reading room back through the lobby of the library, the librarian gave Abdul a nasty look. On the mezzanine, there was an exhibit of graduation class portraits. The class photos didn’t begin until the 1920s, Dean Walters explained. That was when Violet Routledge De Saussure, the founders’ daughter and niece, came up with the idea to document the college’s legacy. In the earliest pictures, most of the faculty, administrators, and students were so pale, they were racially indeterminate, though I thought I recognized a very young, cocky-looking Uncle Root in the class of 1926.

  Keisha tugged on my shirt hem and leaned close. “These supposed to be Black people?”

  “I think so.”

  “They sure don’t look it.”

  Roz walked behind us, whispering, be quiet and look at the pictures. She could trace her Routledge legacy back four generations through her mother; one of the racially indeterminate students in the class pictures was her ancestor, though the bloodline had thickened through the generations. Roz was my mother’s chocolate color, with a heart-shaped face, thick-lashed eyes, and full lips with a small mole at the right corner. She wore her relaxed hair in a braided bun that other students whispered was a cheap wig. Yet besides Keisha and me, no one seemed to notice her beauty. The guys on campus chased after the palest women, the lighter the better.

  But then came the Friday afternoon when the air conditioner in the chapel stopped working. It was one of those early September southern days. The temperature had risen to a freakish place in the nineties, and everyone in the chapel was sweating. Dean Walters went to find maintenance, warning us, do not leave. He would be checking roll when he returned.

  Beside me, Roz fanned herself, sighing; she was about to pass out. She reached to her neck and pulled out her bobby pins. Her braid fell to her waist.

  “Ooh, girl.” Keisha unraveled Roz’s braid, and whispers began in the chapel. Wait, that wasn’t a wig, after all? That was her real hair?

  The next morning, when our roommate pinned up her braid, Keisha walked behind and yanked out the bobby pins.

  “No, uh-uh, Roz. You look like an old lady with that bun.”

  “You got your nerve. Where you get that ugly dress? Your grandma?”

  Keisha didn’t even acknowledge the insult. She pulled Roz’s hair into a loose ponytail, asking me to get a rubber band from her purse. I searched past the packets of disposable handkerchiefs and loose peppermint candy until I found the band, and after Keisha was done, we both clapped our hands. We remarked how beautiful Roz was, as she told us to stop ribbing her up. She didn’t have any money to give us.

  That was the morning that six guys stopped us on the way to breakfast. They all directed their conversation to our roommate. The next morning in mandatory Sunday chapel, Keisha had to elbow two brothers out of the way when they tried to sit on either side of Roz. Shame on them, Keisha said. Trying to flirt on the Lord’s day, but she was grinning.

  * * *

  At the next Freshman Orientation, Dean Walters focused on the change to the curriculum of the college.

  When Mrs. Adeline Routledge had been alive, the college had aligned itself with the principles of Du Bois and featured a liberal arts curriculum. In theory, the students of Routledge College were supposed to provide a buffer between the folks living in the Georgia countryside and the white citizens of the state; graduates were charged to go out into the world and present an example of what glories the race could accomplish when its members put their minds to it. However, in practice, the college had been viewed as rabble-rousers by whites in the community, and interracial relations were violent. In 1916, two Black male faculty members were murdered on their way back from a visit to Atlanta, and in 1919, another disappeared and was never heard from again after he tried and failed to protect his wife from gang rape at the hands of five white men.

  Tensions settled greatly in 1924, however, when Mr. Thierry
De Saussure, Violet’s husband, added a vocational track to the schedule of courses, similar to the academic track of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, led by Booker T. Washington. Though the move was applauded as timely and practical by Routledge’s all-white board of trustees, in late September of that same year, there were protests from the faculty—Black and white members alike—who encouraged the students to join them; three-quarters of the student body refused to attend classes, and the other students sat looking silly in empty rooms. Mr. De Saussure responded to the protests by firing half the faculty and giving those truant students the weekend to decide whether they would attend classes again on Monday morning or be expelled. Without their faculty leaders, the students’ courage folded and they refilled the classes, including the new agricultural science courses for the young men, and the domestic courses for their female counterparts; those classes would be eliminated in 1985, but Mr. De Saussure’s proclamation was well recorded in college history:

  “Miss Adeline founded this institution on nothing except love for our people and never-ending prayer. If need be, I will rebuild Routledge College on those two humble foundations.”

  Abdul raised his hand. “Why’d that De Saussure dude add that vocational track like at Tuskegee? I don’t get that. Everybody knows Booker T. Washington was an Uncle Tom.”

  “Really? Who is this everybody?” our professor asked.

  “Like, everybody in Philly.”

  “Tell me, do any of your friends carry guns in Philadelphia?”

  “Yeah, we got them jawns.” Abdul looked around severely, like he planned to shoot up the entire bourgie section.

  “Down south, civilized Black men don’t carry weapons on our persons. We carry our intellects. Down here, African Americans must learn how to improvise. That’s what Mr. Booker T. Washington did at Tuskegee, and what Mr. De Saussure did here as well. He knew that certain southern whites did not want African Americans going to college, so he tricked those whites by requiring the vocational track. That way, they wouldn’t know he also was teaching us science, math, literature, and foreign languages. And I am grateful for that improvisation, because this school was still standing when I enrolled in the fall of 1954, instead of being burned to ash by the Ku Klux Klan. Aren’t you happy about that?”