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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  “But when that Negro man leaves the house, he doesn’t understand, he leaves his wife alone. She’s the one who does the backbreaking work to keep his house clean. She raises his children. And that’s only if he earns enough money to make sure she doesn’t have to work. If he doesn’t, she’s leaving her children with her mother or grandmother, and dressing up, too, to make money, as a schoolteacher. Or, more likely, she’s working as a domestic in the white folks’ kitchen, or she’s out there in the fields right beside her husband, helping him to plow, but then she’s got to make sure the children are all right, and feed them, and feed him, too. And again, keep the house clean.

  “So I want you to think about how Mrs. Du Bois felt that day her little boy died in 1899. There was a diphtheria epidemic in Atlanta that year, and because of how brutal the white people in that city were, the Negroes were afraid to give the vaccination to their children. Dr. Du Bois was afraid, and so he wasn’t able to save his child. The little boy that Mrs. Du Bois had carried inside her body passed away. No man can truly understand a mother’s pain.”

  Uncle Root walked closer to the front pews of the chapel. Briefly, he put a hand over his mouth.

  “Lord have mercy, that lady must have grieved so badly for her baby boy! But Mrs. Du Bois continued to support her husband in his work. We don’t see the written record of what she did, but rest assured Mrs. Du Bois labored right alongside him. And she bore him another child, though she must have been so afraid of losing another baby. I think that woman was so remarkable! If it weren’t for Mrs. Du Bois, there would be no great scholar. And if it weren’t for Adeline Ruth Hutchinson Routledge, another remarkable Negro woman, there would be no Routledge College. Make no mistake about that.”

  Uncle Root raised the finger again. He let the quiet muster, for his young audience was listening now. They’d forgotten their boredom, or at any rate, the female students had.

  “I want every one of you to meditate on the importance of the Negro woman. Without her struggles, who would our people be? We’d be heathens, that’s what we would be! We’d be stumbling around in the dark! The Negro woman is the best our race has to offer. My children, we must always cherish and love this woman. We must never leave her behind.”

  Beside Belle, her roommate giggled: Marie had a very big crush on Uncle Root. She was gossipy, too. In October, when a boy named Stanley Culpepper walked across the refectory, sat down at Belle’s table, and asked her to the fall formal, Marie told everybody on campus the details about the young man. He was from Detroit and talked frequently about the many wonders of Motown. The word on campus was that Stanley only dated light-skinned girls, but something about Belle must have caught his eye, dark as she was.

  For the formal dance, Belle wore a rose chiffon gown and Stanley cleaned up nicely for the evening. He bought her a carnation wrist corsage and gave her his arm to walk into the refectory, which was decorated like a ballroom with cloths covering the tables. But then he left her for twenty minutes inside the gym while he drank bug juice with his Gamma fraternity brothers outside, ignoring the danger of snakes that might be braided into the blackberry bushes a few feet from the gym’s back entrance. After the dance, Stanley asked her to walk to his Buick, and Belle thought things might be looking up. Maybe they would drive for a late dinner. They said Paschal’s in Atlanta had good fried chicken. The restaurant was owned by distant cousins of some folks in Chicasetta. But after Stanley stopped at the gate and paid the five-dollar bribe to the guard, he drove out to a country field. The car bumped along in the grass until Stanley stopped the car. Then he leaned over, and without kissing Belle, he shoved his hand up her dress.

  She started kicking but couldn’t do much damage: she was only five feet and not even a hundred pounds. But after pushing her down on the front seat of his car and throwing her dress and crinolines into her face, Stanley couldn’t figure out how to pull off her merry widow.

  “What’s going on here?” Stanley leaned back on the seat, puffing air. “I thought you knew the score.”

  “What’s that?” Belle asked.

  “I take you to the dance and you put out. That’s why I asked you.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen, Stanley.”

  “Look, kid, you’d be pretty if you weren’t so black. But you are.” Stanley’s voice hardened. “And if I don’t get me some pussy, you’re walking back to campus.”

  It wasn’t the first time Belle had been called that: “black” meaning “dark-skinned.” It was an insult, but her father liked to say, these niggers with little color shouldn’t be so proud. All light skin meant was that some cracker had forced his way up a poor Negro woman’s dress, and what kind of prize was that? Naturally, her father didn’t say that around Uncle Root and Dear Pearl, but it was no secret that Belle’s grandmother and great-uncle were partial to darker-skinned folks, too. Look at the people they’d married.

  It was a mystery to Belle why Stanley was so color-struck. He wasn’t even fair-skinned. He was a meriney-toned fellow, and with that nappy hair, Stanley wasn’t passing nobody’s fine-tooth-comb test, neither—but she was sitting in this boy’s front seat. She should be careful about making him mad. She didn’t even know where Stanley had driven them, and these were the years when the white men in the area would drive up to the tall iron fence protecting the college proper. They would park and lean against their cars for two or three hours, watching. Just watching, before they climbed back in their cars and drove away. The college president was obsequious with the influential whites in the other towns, those worried something communist was happening on campus, so there was danger for Belle in the dark. Those white men might catch Belle walking back, her heels in her hand, her stockings ripped by snagging pebbles. Whatever they might do to her, she couldn’t go to the police. No one would believe a Negro girl or even care, no matter what shade she was.

  Belle shifted in a crunch of crinolines. “No, Stanley, I’m not walking. And if you keep on, I’m going to tell my uncle.”

  “You think I’m scared of some hick-ass farmer? Girl, I’m from Detroit!”

  “You don’t know Dr. Jason Freeman Hargrace? The history professor? He’s my uncle, and unless you want him to get you expelled, you start this damned car and take me back to campus.” Technically, Uncle Root was her great-uncle, but the details didn’t matter. She was in a dill pickle here.

  So Stanley started the engine and took her to her dormitory. Belle thought that would be the end of it, but some days later, she was in her room marcelling her roommate’s hair. Marie was difficult; she was tender-headed and always accused Belle of trying to burn her.

  “Ouch!”

  “You know better than to be hopping up when I got these irons in your head.” Belle pulled away and Marie turned around. There was a line between her eyebrows, the hurt of a scolded child.

  “Why’re you being mean, Belle, when I have a secret for you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Somebody told me something about you. Ask me who it is.”

  But Belle continued curling for the next twenty minutes, patting Marie’s shoulder periodically to keep her from squirming. When she was done, she made swooping motions with her fingertips over Marie’s hair.

  “Go see how pretty you look!”

  At the mirror, Marie started back up. “I bet you want to know what I heard. Stanley Culpepper said that a certain someone had relations with him out in the farmer’s field. Twice.”

  “Really?” Belle’s voice held no interest, but there was cut glass in her stomach.

  “He sure did. You know who that certain someone is? You.” Marie laughed, a sound with a hungry edge.

  “That’s what he told you?”

  “No, he told Floyd. Floyd told Dennis. Dennis told Walter, and you know Walter and me are going steady.”

  Marie lifted a chain from underneath her blouse. On it was a gold ring set with the tiniest of rubies, but Belle kept a straight face when she told her roommate that she
’d planned on losing her virginity to Stanley—yes, it was true—but when he’d pulled down his pants, his “boy” had been tiny, and worse, it wouldn’t get up. She’d pulled on it for close to forty-five minutes while it flopped back and forth. Poor thing. Stanley was deformed, but even though he couldn’t do the deed, Belle had promised him that they’d always be friends.

  You Made Me Love You

  By the fall of Belle’s sophomore year, Stanley Culpepper had transferred to Albany State and Belle kept to herself. No other young men approached her for a date, and that was fine by her. She wasn’t like her roommate; Marie Giles and her boyfriend, Walter Lipscomb, already had planned their wedding for after graduation.

  Belle didn’t have time for men. She’d decided that she didn’t want to be a schoolteacher in the public schools; now she wanted to be a college professor. The work required to reach this apex, a master’s degree and possibly a doctorate, didn’t scare Belle. Whenever Belle walked across campus, there was a strut to her step. She might be too dark for her color-struck classmates to think she was pretty, but she had a perfect grade point average and was in the running for valedictorian of her class.

  The first semester of her senior year, she took Medieval to Renaissance Literature. She was an English major, and it was a requirement for graduation, but the third week of classes, she tried to check out the translation of The Canterbury Tales. She wanted to get the jump on the final paper, but the librarian told her someone else had it, Geoffrey Garfield. Belle had spotted him in class. He was a senior, too. He’d given her appreciative looks, but he was much too fair-skinned for her tastes.

  The day she walked over to the men’s dorm, she dressed carefully as usual, in an orange cashmere sweater, matching skirt, and black shoes with a heel. Her hair was freshly pressed and curled, and she’d dusted cocoa powder on her nose to kill the shine.

  She sent the dorm proctor to retrieve Geoffrey, and in the lobby, he told her he needed the translation for his paper.

  “But we could share it, couldn’t we, Belle?”

  “I don’t want to share. I want to read it all by myself.”

  She sighed, but he smiled and asked permission to walk her to the library. He’d bring the book along, and maybe they could negotiate. She told him, all right, but she really needed the book, and she didn’t have time for all this back and forth. When they squeezed into a carrel in the stacks, Geoffrey whispered an invitation.

  “What?”

  “I said, may I escort you to the fall formal?”

  “Why?” Belle didn’t whisper. She wanted to make sure he heard her, but Geoffrey didn’t miss a beat when he told Belle that she was beautiful and smart, and he’d be proud to have her on his arm.

  “You think I’m beautiful?”

  “Of course, Belle. Don’t you have a mirror in your dormitory?”

  She searched for excuses to be rude, but this boy had thrown her. “All right, Geoffrey—”

  “—call me Geoff—”

  “Fine, Geoff, let’s say I agree to go to the dance with you—”

  “—great!—”

  “Hold on a minute. I didn’t say I’d go. I said, let’s say. Let me ask you something: Do you know my uncle, Dr. Jason Freeman Hargrace?”

  “Sure. Everybody knows him.”

  “Well, he gave me a switchblade, and I know how to use it, just in case you try to get fresh.”

  The reference to possible violence didn’t seem to put Geoff off. He laughed and let her know he’d like to take her and the switchblade to the fall formal.

  Her ivory gown and cape for the formal were duplicates of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy’s inaugural ball ensemble. Geoff wore a tuxedo with a white jacket and bought her a pink rose corsage. When the disc jockey put on “Reet Petite,” he stood. This white-looking boy had nerve, but on the floor, he twirled Belle around with rhythm. After the dance, he wanted to drive to Paschal’s in Atlanta, but she put him off.

  “Some other time. Could you walk me back to my dorm, please?”

  “As long as there’s another chance, I’m fine. And so are you, Belle Driskell.”

  After the formal, Geoff began showing at her dormitory to walk her to breakfast, to sit with her at lunch and dinner, and to accompany her to the library. He insisted on carrying her books, too. There were stares and whispers, and Belle made sure to dress in her best everyday attire. She wanted those high-yellow girls who thought Geoff should be with them to get a look. He brought her the candy that his mother sent him in gift packages and copied out excerpts of his favorite poems for Belle in his neat cursive handwriting.

  She already had received Marie’s gossip, that he wasn’t like others, those who only dated darker young women for sex. For some reason, Geoff preferred chocolate-toned ladies. He was a gentleman, too. Other young women had reported that when you said no, he was real sweet about things. As weeks passed, Geoff offered his own biography: he was from the north, from the City. His father was a doctor, and he expected Geoff to become a doctor, too. Geoff had wanted to be a schoolteacher, but his parents had vetoed that decision, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make it on his own. But Geoff had refused to pledge his father’s fraternity, the same one W. E. B. Du Bois belonged to—the only defiance Geoff felt he could get away with.

  The day he asked Belle to go steady was the first time they kissed, on Violet’s bench by the side of the library. If someone really wanted to spy, they could, but the bench that was named for Adeline Routledge’s daughter was sheltered by a canopy of tall bushes. When Geoff leaned over, asking, could he have a kiss, Belle didn’t expect much. There had been a boy in seventh grade who’d kissed her, but that had been wet and uninspiring, so she was surprised by the feeling that took her. She felt like she was drunk on her daddy’s jar of moonshine, and she put her hand up to Geoff’s cheek, then the back of his neck. She opened her mouth, letting her tongue travel to his.

  He was the first to stop. There was a catch to his breath as he said, gee, she was wonderful. He hoped he wasn’t being ungentlemanly, and Belle told him, no, not at all. She didn’t know how to ask for more kisses, to tell him she wasn’t satisfied with those few seconds. But she didn’t want to be forward, so she folded her hands in her lap. He sighed, and then stood, reaching for her books. Halfway back to the dorm, he began to recite a poem by Langston Hughes, about Negro girls of various, beautiful shades, like chocolate.

  “Listen to you!” She giggled. “You are something else.”

  “You bring it out in me.” He jumped a bit off the ground. “You make me so happy, Belle.”

  They kissed the next day, and every day afterward, until it was time for the Christmas break. Before Geoff drove home for the holidays, he asked for her address, and until the break was over, she received long letters from him nearly every day. And when they returned to campus, there were more kisses on Violet’s bench outside the library, and if Belle wasn’t completely satisfied with necking a few minutes, she told herself, her restraint was for a purpose. She couldn’t lose control, because Geoff might be nice but there was no way a boy that looked like he did could bring home somebody who looked like her. He was not her great-uncle Root, a pale-skinned man who had married a dark brown woman and adored her. No man was as good as her great-uncle—not even her daddy—and that was fine, because Belle was only having some fun until she graduated. But not too much fun. She didn’t need to get pregnant; she had plans for her life.

  That would have settled things, if it hadn’t been for her brother Roscoe. He changed the entire course of her life, the night that Roscoe let his blood get up. That famous temper of his reared, even behind the bars of the regional prison where he was serving twenty years when Roscoe sassed a guard there. At least that’s what the warden told Miss Rose and Hosea when they went to pick up their oldest son’s body.

  In five years, when one of Roscoe’s friends on the chain gang was released, he’d tell the Driskells that the guard had tried something with Roscoe. Something like what
a man wanted to do with a woman. He wouldn’t say exactly what it was—not in front of Miss Rose—but the friend had hitchhiked to the farm of Roscoe’s parents because he felt like he owed them something. After the friend sat awhile and drank some sweet tea and ate through the generously loaded plate that Miss Rose had prepared, Hosea Driskell gave him a ride to Madison. The friend had traveled a good distance, in order to do right by Roscoe, and the father wasn’t gone let somebody who’d offered a powerful kindness wear out his shoe leather.

  But that truth given by Roscoe’s friend was five years away, and thus, when the warden told the Driskells they could pick up their son’s bullet-ridden body, the warden didn’t tell them he was sorry for their loss, only that if they hadn’t shown in forty-eight hours, he would have buried their son in an unmarked grave. That was on a Wednesday afternoon.

  Early Thursday morning, Miss Rose went into town to the home of Cordelia Pinchard Rice. She told Cordelia’s maid what happened, and when the maid showed her into the front room (because Cordelia was “good white folks,” a liberal type of lady), Miss Rose asked if she could make a long-distance phone call to Routledge College. They didn’t have no phone out in the country. Cordelia said, of course, and so Miss Rose left an emergency message for Uncle Root with the campus operator, and after he received the message and called Miss Rose back, he walked over to the refectory and found his niece at a table, eating lunch with Geoff and Marie.

  He wouldn’t tell Belle what was wrong, only that they were driving to Chicasetta right away, and he ignored Belle’s questions on the journey. It wasn’t until he pulled up in front of the house of her parents that he cautioned her to brace herself, and told her what had happened. And then, Uncle Root held her as she screamed and cried. She smeared cocoa powder on the front of his clean white shirt, but he didn’t complain. The funeral was held four days after that, and Mr. Cruddup, the family mortician, somehow made Roscoe look completely natural; that was remarked upon by those who attended the service at Red Mound Church. Three of those days, Belle would not remember, only that when her memory returned, she was coming to at her brother’s funeral. She fainted again, and when she woke up, her mother was sitting on the side of her bed. Belle told her mother everything had changed. She wasn’t going back to college. She would stay at home and be a beautician, but Miss Rose set her lips: she had waited too long to see her baby girl become a schoolteacher and she won’t gone be disappointed. She needed something to look forward to, and she held Belle, patting her daughter’s back. She kissed the top of the girl’s head, as she hadn’t since Belle had been very little.