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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  “Belle, hi! It’s Diane!”

  “Oh. Hey yourself.”

  “How are you? How’s the baby?”

  “She’s good. Crawling now.”

  Diane chattered on, telling Belle that she and Lawrence had enrolled in graduate school at Mecca University, she in the psychology program, and Lawrence in English. Then she dropped the news.

  “I guess you heard about Lawrence and me breaking up.”

  “Really? I’m so sorry.” Belle hoped her insincerity didn’t show, for she already knew about the separation. The usually composed Claire Garfield had been upset, but Belle had been secretly pleased when her mother-in-law disclosed the news at Sunday dinner. Belle hadn’t liked Lawrence anyway: he’d never called her once to ask, did she and the baby need anything? Stuck-up yellow bastard.

  “Yeah, it’s heavy,” Diane said, and Belle made an understanding noise, even though she didn’t know what that meant. “I have a studio near the campus now.”

  “But that’s a Negro neighborhood.”

  “No, it’s integrated, because I live there.”

  “Diane, one white person in five city blocks does not mean integration. Who told you that? Lord, today!”

  Belle heard her mother’s voice in her head: Diane seemed like good white folks, like Cordelia Rice down in Chicasetta. Give her a chance. It would be the Christian thing to befriend her, because this girl didn’t have one bit of sense. Clearly, she needed some people to look after her. Though Belle didn’t exactly want to be bothered, she asked Diane over to dinner.

  “Oh, goodness! Really? You don’t need to ask Geoff?”

  “Girl, I’m grown. And I run this house.”

  “Then how wonderful! I can’t wait to see you! I hope this means we’re friends, because you can’t get rid of me now.”

  Diane burst into giggles, for seemingly no reason, and Belle was surprised when her heart squeezed in response.

  Some nights, her husband didn’t come in until late from the library, and she began inviting Diane over regularly. On those days that Diane wasn’t in classes, she took walks with Belle and the baby. It wasn’t hard for Belle anymore with someone to help. If the baby made an accident, Diane would sing made-up songs to her while her mother stripped off the soiled clothes.

  Soon, Belle felt no shame telling Diane she’d “had” to get married, though she didn’t regret her baby. In turn, Diane offered her own secrets: she hadn’t known Lawrence was a Negro when they began dating. When he let out his secret after an entire semester, he gave the excuse that he hadn’t found the right moment. It hadn’t been an issue for Diane, though, and it hadn’t upset her parents when she took him home to meet her folks. Mr. Murphy had given a surprised grunt. He’d looked over at Mrs. Murphy, and when she’d nodded her approval, that was that.

  Diane’s was a big Catholic family of eight children, and she was the youngest. Her mother hadn’t wanted Diane to be a workhorse like she’d been, some man’s wife toiling in rural Maine. She’d had higher hopes for her daughter, but when she found out Diane was moving to Massachusetts for college, Mrs. Murphy had wept for a month. It was funny, for she hadn’t shed a tear over Lawrence. He came from a well-off family and belonged to the Church. And he couldn’t help what he was, Mrs. Murphy said, no more than Diane could. Her parents were descended from Irish immigrants. They were supposed to be white but didn’t live any better than many Negroes. Her mother told Diane that she should see the lesson in that.

  “I don’t believe nobody in your family cared,” Belle said.

  “What do you mean?” Diane asked.

  “I think if you had brought a poor boy home who looked Negro, it might have been different. Your daddy might have tried to kill him, but then, if he had looked Negro and had been poor, I don’t think you would have wanted him in the first place.”

  Diane sat up, her brown eyes wide. “Yes, I would have! I wouldn’t have cared! Don’t you think white people can be color-blind?”

  “That’s a medical condition.” Belle looked down at her coffee. She hoped the baby would wake up, crying to feed, but leave it to that greedy child to stay asleep, for once.

  In weeks, Diane had a key to her sister-in-law’s apartment, in case of emergencies. She had confided something else, this time at dinner, right in front of Geoff: she’d left Lawrence because she’d caught him cheating with an undergraduate student at Mecca, a young girl no older than nineteen. Or she assumed they were cheating: she’d seen them laughing together in the stacks at the library. Diane had rounded a corner to see the girl running her hand down Lawrence’s arm as he leaned over her, looking at her in a way that should be reserved only for his wife.

  This conversation was women’s territory: Geoff had hung his head, ashamed over his brother. In bed that night, he’d said he hoped Lawrence’s misbehavior wouldn’t harm his own marriage, because Belle was married to a faithful man. She could take that promise to the bank and cash it.

  At that meal in the small kitchen, Diane hadn’t identified the girl’s race. And when Belle had asked, had the girl with Lawrence been Negro or white? her sister-in-law had blushed and said she couldn’t remember. Belle knew then, even if Diane didn’t suffer from a medical condition, she truly didn’t care what race somebody was. Instead of pleasing Belle, this discovery made her furious, and she walked to the stove, though the burners were off and had cooled.

  Belle stirred a pot of lukewarm greens to cover the noise of her loud breathing. Her outraged exhalations, as she considered that Diane was a white woman who could walk through the world and stay blessedly unaware of the color line.

  * * *

  The day of the first riot in the City was in fall 1967. Lydia pulled up on a chair and let go for several seconds. Belle was excited, and though she had visited Miss Martha’s store only the day before for their Wednesday Bible study, she decided to walk there and give the good news.

  She was standing at the counter, holding Lydia, when she heard raised voices outside. Miss Martha held out her arms. The baby went to her, and Belle followed the old lady outside. In the street, folks were clotted, grumbling. A police car had stopped behind a late-model Buick. The driver’s door was ajar, and one of the cops, an older, short white man, had pinned a Negro man to the hood of the police car. The other cop, also white, was younger, taller and leaner. He had pulled out both his club and his gun.

  The Negro was dressed in a shiny gray suit and his hands were interlaced behind his neck. His stomach rested on the front hood of the police car, and Belle could only see the back of his trimmed, neat hair.

  “Um, um, um,” Miss Martha intoned.

  “What you reckon he done did?” Belle asked.

  “Probably nothing, child. You know how these polices is.”

  “He shole look hot in that suit.”

  “Don’t he, though? Bless his heart.”

  Belle wasn’t sure what happened next, if the man in the fancy suit said something off to the white cop pinning him down, or if the steady, loudening rumbles of the crowd agitated them, but suddenly the younger cop hit the Negro on his head with the club. There were raw screams and blood poured, and Belle began to shake. She thought of her brother: what Roscoe probably had endured before he’d been killed.

  Miss Martha told her she smelled trouble, and hurried with the baby inside the store. She returned shortly with a large sack. She placed Lydia inside her carriage and fitted the sack at the baby’s feet.

  “You be sure to call me when y’all get back home,” Miss Martha said. “You got the number. And don’t worry ’bout paying for no groceries. You can catch me next time.”

  When Geoff returned to the apartment that evening, he was breathing hard. For two days, there were sirens and screaming outside and lights flashing through the curtains. Belle called the store, worried.

  “Miss Martha, you all right?”

  “Child, yes. The windows got busted, but I put up some boards. I’m upstairs, listening to the radio.”

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nbsp; “I don’t like you being alone over there. I’ma send Geoff around.”

  “You leave that man alone. I got my shotgun in case somebody try to mess with me. And I done seen worse with the Ku Kluxers back home. At least ain’t nobody hanging from that telephone pole ’cross the street. Thank you, Father God.”

  “All right, then. But I’ma check back on you.”

  After she hung up, Belle remembered her sister-in-law, and when the girl answered the phone, she ordered her not to leave her studio. “Do you hear me, Diane? Don’t make me pack up this baby and come sit on you.”

  “That’s not much of a threat, Belle. You don’t even weigh a hundred pounds.”

  “I weigh one hundred and ten, for your information.”

  “Oh my goodness. Excuse me, fatso.”

  By the end of the week, the neighborhood had calmed, and Diane showed for dinner. But this time, she brought company: Lawrence. They sat closely at the kitchen table, laughing at inside jokes while the other couple cut eyes at each other.

  When her sister-in-law called the next morning, Belle was chilly: “Hey yourself.”

  “You think worse of me, don’t you? I could tell at dinner.”

  “You said you thought Lawrence cheated on you. Now, if you want to be a fool like in some Aretha song, that’s your business.” Belle wanted to punish her sister-in-law. She’d gotten used to one set of circumstances, and now she was being forced to adapt.

  “Everybody can’t be as tough as you.”

  “I’m not, Diane. I just have me some pride, and clearly, you don’t.”

  “That’s a really, really shitty thing to say.”

  Diane hung up, but the next day, Belle called to apologize.

  There was much news that winter. The reconciliation of her in-laws stuck, and Belle found out she was pregnant again. At first, she concealed the news from her husband, and didn’t answer his concern over her new crying jags. She told him only when she’d broken down and tried down-home methods, which didn’t work; scalding-hot baths and cups of fresh ginger tea did not bring on her bleeding. But Geoff was so happy, as he’d been with the first pregnancy. She remembered that night in the field when he placed his hand on her stomach. Only twenty-three, but Geoff already believed he could work miracles.

  When Belle thought she might be showing, she sent him alone to Sunday dinner at her in-laws’. She was too tired. That’s what she said, but really, she didn’t want to face her husband’s mother. Her diaphragm had failed her, and she was barely holding on. But soon, Belle’s fears wouldn’t matter. In her third month, she miscarried.

  Belle hadn’t wanted the new baby, but when she sat on the toilet that early morning and the large red clump dropped from her, followed by slick blood, she stayed on the toilet and wept for an hour, until Lydia awakened, making her hungry sounds.

  * * *

  In April, Uncle Root called. He had on his funereal voice, with many clearings of the throat, and Belle knew that somebody was dead. She walked backward until her foot found a chair, and when her great-uncle revealed that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered, she said “no” repeatedly, sucking up her tears.

  Uncle Root told her the story about when he had met the minister. He’d heard the young man was speaking in Atlanta. Uncle Root had lost his wife, and it had made him reckless, the way Death could wiggle his square toes. Reckless because his college president had begun to send out warnings on official letterhead that any faculty member suspected of involvement in “civil agitation” would be summarily fired. But without telling anyone—even his family members—Uncle Root drove to Atlanta anyway and sat in the pews of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King’s sermon gave him new life. Afterward Uncle Root felt optimistic about getting older: the world was in smoother, better hands, and in 1963, he attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Before he drove his car north for the march, he told Belle and everybody else on campus he was going. He knew he was openly defying the orders of the president of Routledge College, and he no longer cared. The man was a hopeless toady to white people, and if Uncle Root was fired because his boss wanted to lick the boots of segregationists, so be it. Uncle Root had some money saved for the uncertain future; for the time being, he was going to enjoy himself, like a hardworking Negro man should.

  He took the entire week off and stayed with his friend Freddy Hamilton, who was an English teacher. The two of them had met while graduate students at Mecca, and Freddy, a “confirmed bachelor,” had adored Uncle Root’s late wife. Freddy used to stock his refrigerator and pantry with gourmet food for Aunt Olivia: tins of caviar, pâté, and exotic fruits such as mangos and papayas, and his guest room had been filled with fresh flowers and gifts. Often, the items for Aunt Olivia had been very expensive, such as the French perfume, and that red silk nightgown hanging in the guest room closet. But Uncle Root knew Freddy’s romantic interests lay with young men, so he had learned to put his jealousy aside.

  At the march, Freddy kept sighing and declaring, things just weren’t the same without Aunt Olivia, and, oh, how he wished she had lived to see this gathering! The march lasted all day, but then someone announced that W. E. B. Du Bois had died in Ghana at the home of that country’s president. Uncle Root had tried to collect himself as Mahalia Jackson took the podium. She was the lead-in before King, who was the expected climax of the long march. She was resplendent in her grand, church lady hat, the spiritual she sang so familiar. And Uncle Root had taken off his own hat, using it to cover his face as he wept over the great scholar, someone he’d considered a father, if only in his fantasies.

  On the phone, Uncle Root stopped speaking for seconds, while he cleared his throat ferociously. Belle was quiet, too, waiting for him to speak.

  “I can’t believe it, beloved. I can’t understand the choices God makes.”

  Who was he grieving, Dr. King or the great scholar? Or Aunt Olivia? Maybe he was missing everybody he’d lost from the time he was a child, and that sadness was on him, a pulsing cloud, like Belle had felt after she’d had Lydia.

  She hung up and turned on the TV, hopeful that her great-uncle had been mistaken, but there was Walter Cronkite looking forlorn. When the phone rang again, it was her mother, shrieking. For five minutes, one phrase repeated: Lord have mercy. Listening to Miss Rose, Belle’s heart began to hurt. The phone sounded a third time: it was her sister-in-law, talking through her sobs. Belle told her to come on over. She didn’t have to be alone.

  “Okay, but . . . can Lawrence come, too?”

  “What I say? Y’all both are surely welcome.” In the kitchen, she pulled out pans and pots. Back home, Negroes would be killing chickens for the rituals of mourning. Dr. King had been a stranger to Belle, but every Negro she knew adored him. In her hometown, on her college campus, he was next to Jesus: Miss Rose kept a framed photograph of the young preacher on the living room wall. When someone died, mourners had to be nice to each other for a few days, too. The fourth call came: it was Belle’s mother-in-law, and she consoled the woman, all the while thinking, Dr. King was the only brown person her mother-in-law had admired. Belle didn’t invite Miss Claire to visit, however. Home training only went so far.

  There was knocking at the door. She answered, and the young couple at her threshold looked a mess. Lawrence’s hair was rumpled, his clothes wrinkled. Diane’s face was puffy and pink. Belle opened her arms, and her much taller sister-in-law rushed to her, weeping violently as Belle rubbed her back, saying, it was all right. It was okay. Belle put two full plates on the table, and when she filled Lawrence’s coffee cup, he grabbed her hand. Soon, her husband was there. Mecca University had closed out of respect, but it had been frightening on the way home. A Negro man had blocked Geoff’s way, but he’d let him pass after Geoff recited a random poem by Langston Hughes. Despite her grief, Belle found the energy to stand over the stove. She boiled collards with a ham hock. Thawed and fried two chickens. Baked a pound cake and several pans of corn bread. Mashed sweet potatoes for the
baby, and then decided to make a pie.

  She put a stack of Aretha records on the player. Belle refused to call her favorite singer by her full name: where Belle came from, the last name “Franklin” was an insult. The two couples had a dance party in the living room and tried to shake off their blues. Belle taught her in-laws how to play bid whist, and Diane learned how to talk smack across the board. Unlike the young Negroes rioting outside, they obeyed rules and stayed inside: the governor had imposed a curfew. But after three days of forced isolation, tempers broke.

  “I need to get out there with my brothers! I should do something!” Lawrence shouted, without rising from the couch. His wife kicked his foot and told him, lower his damned voice. She pointed at the baby’s room, where Geoff was reading Dr. Seuss out loud.

  Belle went to the kitchen and returned with a plate of food for her brother-in-law. He asked, were there any more biscuits? If not, he’d love some corn bread.

  Diane erupted: “You just ate breakfast!”

  “Maybe he could eat again,” Belle said. “Could you let the Negro have some peace?”

  Her brother-in-law offered thanks and shoveled into his plate. He didn’t see the women exchange their mocking smiles above his head. Their rolled eyes.

  * * *

  Down south, the old folks liked to say, trouble don’t last always. This was true in the City, too. The streets calmed, though sadness lingered. This time, however, when Belle showed up at the store, the plywood hadn’t been taken down. Miss Martha announced, she wasn’t gone bother because she was leaving the City. She had waited for Belle to come by; she’d wanted to see her and the baby before she left.

  “What? Miss Martha, no!”

  The baby squealed happily. When Belle handed her over, she slapped at Miss Martha’s chest and received a kiss on her forehead.

  “Yes, child. I got to go.”

  “But why?”

  “Child, I’m too old for this foolishness. I’m going back home. Let my sons take care of me.” She handed the baby back and reached into her bosom for a slip of paper. “Here my address. Don’t you forget to write. And send me pictures, too.”