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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  “Only for special occasions.”

  “You lying.”

  “Why you so pressed, Roz? You the one told me I needed a man. Like you and Curt.”

  “He’s in grad school, Ailey. You think I’m stupid enough to believe he’s faithful in Virginia?”

  “So why y’all still together?”

  “Because he sends me a check every month. You know the deal. Ailey, you can’t let a man treat you like this. Where’s your backbone?”

  “Why you gotta be so hard on Abdul? He’s already had it bad. I told you how poor he was growing up.”

  “So that means he gets to be a jerk? Last I heard, home training don’t cost a dime.”

  “Roz, I love him. At least . . . I think I do.”

  “You think you love him. Okay, just tell me this. Are y’all using protection?”

  From the living room, there were shouts as the Bulls let go of the ball. They needed to call Jordan off the bench. Forget his rest. He could rest after they won the game.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, Roz, but yes, we use condoms.”

  “Can’t you get your father to write you a prescription for the Pill?”

  “You think I want my daddy knowing I have sex? That’s disgusting.”

  “I hope you know if you end up pregnant, I’m moving out. I can’t be roomies with somebody can’t handle her business.”

  She left me there, leaning against the counter. I turned my back to the kitchen door and picked up a chicken breast. I didn’t want Abdul to see me. He’d told me I needed to start watching my diet before I gained weight. He liked me big-boned, but fat and sloppy was another thing entirely.

  “Hey, beautiful lady, what you doing?” Pat asked.

  I dropped the breast on the floor. “Ooh! You scared me!”

  He picked the chicken up, blew on it and bit into it.

  “Pat!”

  “Girl, whatever. God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt. Ooh, this breast is so good and juicy. Mmm.”

  He smacked his lips loudly. Two more big bites, and he was finished. Then he looked around at the mess in the kitchen. The flour on the counter. The splotches of grease on the stove top. The mound of dirty dishes in the sink. He threw out the chicken bone and told me he’d be right back. When he returned, a large bath towel was tucked into the front of his waistband. He put the stopper in the sink and turned on the faucet. He asked, where was the dishwashing liquid?

  * * *

  When it came to men, Keisha was even more careful than Roz and me. The flesh was weak. Real weak, and the Devil stayed wide awake, she insisted. She didn’t date or even talk to young men for more than a few seconds at a time. And the long dresses she wore announced her disinterest in anybody touching her, if they could even get past the waist-high panties, long-line girdle, full slip, and pantyhose she wore underneath those dresses, throughout every season.

  But in April of our sophomore year, Keisha opened up to Roz and me. She told us she had something on her spirit she wanted to talk about. Keisha always had been honest with us about her poverty, that she’d grown up in the projects, and was on a full scholarship. She had no shame over that, but that night over cherry soda and ribs in our room, she confided that she wasn’t truly a virgin. A cousin of hers had raped her when she was nine. Keisha had shown her mother the blood in her panties, but she was spanked for lying. Her mother told her that her period was coming in early. Puberty was turning her fast, and that’s why she was musty, and making up lies on her own kin. Keisha’s mother gave her cream deodorant to use and kept leaving her with the cousin to babysit, but then, just when Keisha lost hope, Jesus had appeared to Keisha in her dreams—the same dream for seven nights in a row—telling her she would be redeemed, and on the eighth day, the cousin was killed in a car accident, his body badly cut up by the impact of his going through the windshield, his penis and testicles mangled.

  Her cousin’s death was Keisha’s sign to dedicate her life to the Lord and she was glad about that. Still the Dirty Thirty list hurt her. Because even if Keisha’s name wasn’t on a piece of paper—and even if she’d only been a little girl—she still felt nasty, no matter how hard she prayed. It was like her cousin had left all his filth behind.

  “Do y’all think I’m bad, ’cause of what happened to me?” Keisha asked. “I tried so hard to be a good girl! I promise I did.”

  I held her as she wept. I told her she was as good as any person could get, and for once, Keisha didn’t chastise Roz for cursing, for calling her cousin a low-down motherfucker. Roz told us that’s why she treated men so indifferently. All they could do is pay her bills, because they weren’t worth a damn. Doing this kind of shit to kids, and I was quiet. I held Keisha and smoothed her hair, hoping neither one of my friends would ask, had anything bad like that ever happened to me? I didn’t want them to look at me differently. I wasn’t religious like Keisha was, pledging herself to God.

  A few days later, when the Dirty Thirty list appeared under our door that April morning, I couldn’t even look at it. But Roz snatched up the list. She called the names out loud. None of us were on the list, but there were five young women in our dorm who were listed. Beside each name were the names of the brothers she’d slept with.

  Other colleges had their own infamous lists, but they allowed those who smeared reputations to remain anonymous. At Routledge, there was an honor code to the Dirty Thirty: if a brother wanted to drop a tarnished dime on a young woman, he had to give his name, either his government name or his fraternity moniker, which still identified him. Like “Serve,” Steve’s line name, which popped up next to six girls. And “Shotgun,” Abdul’s line name, which showed only once, next to Precious Harmon.

  I skipped classes and meals in the refectory for three days, asking Keisha to pick up my assignments from my professors. I walked to the vendors in the lobby, feeding change into the vending machines to buy pop, packages of chips, and peanut butter cups. I let the sugar and preservatives console me, and I avoided Abdul’s calls, until he paged me on the third day. The desk monitor who knocked on my door told me I had a visitor in the hallway. Knowing she was watching and would report back to the gossips, I gave Abdul a hug, and let him kiss me briefly on the mouth, before turning my head.

  He led me out to the student parking lot. He told me he wanted to meet me back at the apartment to talk, but not with all these people looking. I climbed in my own car, though he told me he wanted me to ride with him.

  In the parking lot of his complex, he was kind. Tender. “Is something wrong, baby? You’re not returning my messages. I’m asking Keisha where my woman is and she won’t tell me. I know she doesn’t like me, but Roz won’t say nothing, either.”

  He moved to touch my face and I stepped back.

  “What’s wrong? Abdul, you cheated on me!”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean? Your name was right there on the Dirty Thirty next to Precious! And now these bastards on campus are laughing at me! And you were just talking bad about her, too, right in front of me and Roz, when you knew you’d slept with her! How could you do that?”

  “Oh, that. Baby, that ain’t no thing. I didn’t fuck that jawn. I only let her give me head.”

  “That’s still cheating! And you shamed me! And Precious, too. How could you be so ungentlemanly? You don’t see Pat putting his girls’ names down on that list.”

  “That’s cause that nigger soft. He probably gay.” He put on his patronizing voice. “And head doesn’t count as cheating. It only counts if I fuck her proper. Which I would never do with Precious. Everybody knows that jawn’s a hoe. You’re a good girl. That’s why I made you my woman.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better? That you had sex with somebody else, and now you’re calling her names?”

  He spread his hands. “Ailey, I told you, sex and head are two different things. And a man’s gone be a man. A man can’t help but say yes when a hoe with no morals offers to give him head. A
nd anyway, you weren’t officially my girlfriend when that happened.”

  “I was staying at your apartment all the time! We were sleeping overnight in the same bed!”

  “But we hadn’t discussed a committed relationship.”

  “You are crazy. You are loony tunes and low-down and ready for a bed at the Milledgeville hospital.”

  “No, I’m not. You just don’t want to hear the truth. You want me to lie to you and say I don’t like to get my dick sucked, but the truth is you need to learn how to please your man. Maybe if you did what I told you to, instead of always saying no, even when a brother begs you, I wouldn’t need to—”

  I turned around, and he told me, don’t turn my back on him. He was talking to me. Didn’t I hear him talking to me? He spun me around. Pulled me into a hug, though I was struggling, and I could smell that he’d had a beer earlier. When I pushed at his chest, he slapped me. I stumbled back, holding my cheek, and then I turned and ran to my car. As I drove away, I looked in the rearview mirror. He was still standing there.

  Those final weeks of the semester, Abdul and I didn’t see each other in private, but he played a game in the open. He acted as if nothing had happened. He blew kisses at me across the refectory. He touched my arm and used endearments when he saw me on the yard.

  My roommates asked, what was going on? Abdul hadn’t paged me and I hadn’t left on the weekend with my overnight bag, either, and I lied to them that Abdul was studying. Or I was. Or both. I thought I was fooling them, but during finals week, Keisha told me she hoped that Abdul and I had broken up for good. It was clear that he wasn’t living right.

  Abdul’s slap hadn’t left any bruises, and I was grateful for that, but without the evidence, there could be no crime, at least not publicly. And though the campus gossips laughed about my humiliation over his cheating, I was the heroine. Abdul had behaved as men were expected to act, when confronted with his many female options. But I had been faithful. I was the long-suffering, good woman, and Precious was the villain, for she had gone after someone else’s man. To everyone on campus, she was the Jezebel, the slut, the hoe, while I could cling to respectability.

  In the weeks after he hit me, as Abdul blew kisses, I felt trapped by what I’d desired. I’d hoped to wound Tiffany for embarrassing me at the rush, for ridiculing my sister, so I’d slept with Abdul and made it impossible for her to stay with him. Then I’d wanted to be his girlfriend, to prove that I was a good girl, and not a whore who only sneaked out of the dorm to drive to Abdul’s apartment. But the truth was I still felt dirty inside, even when Abdul had tossed me his jacket and everybody knew I belonged to him. I still felt ashamed.

  When summer came, I took my old job back with Dr. Rice and stayed in town with Uncle Root. We took our trips to Atlanta to shop and see a movie, and one afternoon, when we returned, Abdul’s voice was on the answering machine. He mumbled through his message, explaining, he’d found Uncle Root’s number in the Gamma fraternity directory. And he was in Atlanta for the summer again. He had an internship.

  “That young man sounds a bit forlorn,” Uncle Root said. “Are you going to put him out of his misery?”

  I walked to the answering machine and deleted the message, but the next day, there were two messages from Abdul, and even more messages the day after. One day in mid-June, I answered the phone and there was his voice. He sounded sad and disheveled. I pictured him on the other end, hair in need of a trim. A scraggly beard. Eyes red and bloodshot.

  After a few minutes of his stumbling conversation, I told him I needed to go.

  “Wait a minute, Ailey! Why you rushing me off the phone?”

  “I know how much you need to save money. This is long-distance.”

  “But what if I said you were worth it?”

  The next week, I received two insured packages, one with a depressed-looking pink teddy bear displaying a red heart, and another with gold earrings inside a velvet jewelry box. I held the earrings up to the light and located the 14k stamp. There was a card inside with a message about sincerity in the midst of sorrow: he’d bought me a card you give to someone who’d had a death in the family.

  * * *

  Abdul had been arrested once, back in high school. It was him and a bunch of dudes, coming out of a party. Teenagers, fifteen and sixteen years old. The cops had just grabbed them and started cuffing everybody. They wouldn’t even say what the charge was. They’d denied Abdul a phone call, too, and for twelve hours, he’d done everything in that cell not to fall asleep. He’d stood, back against the wall, going over his homework in his head. Surrounded by all those hard legs, guys who looked tough enough to kill. Smelling them and trying to conceal his fear. That night, he hadn’t known if he would make it back to his mother.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “I just . . . I wanted to talk to you, Ailey. Explain myself.”

  He’d asked me to meet him at the waffle place on the highway. It would be his treat, he’d promised, and I’d ordered more than my share. Steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, and unlimited coffee refills.

  “But you’re not explaining.” I waited until the waitress poured my coffee. When she left, I leaned over my plate, lowering my voice. “Why’d you cheat on me?”

  He turned his head to the plate glass window. There wasn’t much of a view: the parking lot, and beyond that, the narrow highway.

  I called his name softly. I told him to look at me.

  “Don’t try this, Abdul. You expect me to feel sorry for you?”

  “You don’t get it. You try working like a Hebrew slave with two part-time jobs for your pledge fees. Giving them Gammas money for their car payments or their rib plates or whatever shit they want, but it don’t matter because they’re still going to beat your ass. And now I’m supposed to belong, but I’m still not good enough. I just slipped up, Ailey. I just got stressed. I didn’t grow up like you. I don’t have a family to take care of me in case something goes wrong. It’s hard out here for a young Black man.”

  “And so you’re saying that’s why you cheated on me?”

  “I told you, Ailey. It wasn’t cheating. I’m not going to argue about that.”

  “Okay, fine. But why did you hit me?”

  “I just lost my temper, Ailey. I’m so sorry, but I was hurting, too. How you’d made me feel ashamed, not wanting me to meet your family. Letting me know I wasn’t good enough.”

  “That’s not true, Abdul!” I leaned over my plate, whispering. “I’d never in a million years say something like that. You were the one who told me I wasn’t your girlfriend.”

  “But that was because you were ashamed of me. It really, really hurt me, Ailey.”

  Playing with the rest of my hungry man’s feast, I told him I forgave him for hitting me, but I couldn’t be his woman anymore. He said he understood, but that he hoped we could keep talking, because he needed someone to listen. He really needed a friend, and maybe we could talk some more, back at his apartment? I told him, no. I couldn’t go back there. That was my final word, but he kept calling, and sent more presents. I began to meet him back at the waffle house, until one day, when he asked if he could kiss me, I told him, all right. Okay.

  The next time he kissed me, he put his hand to my breast. I pushed him off, but then he began to cry. He was sorry, he sobbed. He loved me. He’d never put his hands on me again, and I let him touch me.

  Reunion

  I’d never brought either of my roommates to the family reunion. Keisha would have fit right in, but I couldn’t invite her and snub Roz, and I didn’t know how Roz would respond to the barbecue in the field in front of my granny’s house. To Uncle Norman laughing and drinking beer out of the can and calling our male relatives and friends “boy” and “son.” Every once in a while, shouting, “What you talking ’bout!” and “Watch out there now!” The women of my family and community calling to me and tugging on my clothes and hair. Ordering me into the house to get some petroleum jelly, because I had an ashy
patch on my knee.

  But that summer, I decided to bring Abdul to meet my family. I didn’t want him to think I was ashamed of him. For the family reunion, I wore my new lavender linen dress and my strappy sandals. Abdul was looking good, too; I’d called him the previous week and reminded him, be sure to get a haircut. I didn’t want a scene like the summer before, when a cousin had brought her boyfriend down from Cleveland, where they’d had a revival of the pimp-inspired, Black male press-n-curl. As a joke, Uncle Norman had brought his electric clippers to my cousin’s picnic table. The clippers had hummed and buzzed throughout the meal, like a Greek chorus.

  My granny’s brother decided to play his banjo. Uncle Huck sat in a chair on the porch, picking and singing the blues in a baritone. Down in the yard, there were cheers, folks shouting, play that thing, Huck! Play it! Mr. Luke looked on smiling and clapping, and everyone pretended they didn’t know the two men were more than friends.

  I leaned into Abdul’s side, whispering I knew my family was ’bama, but he kissed my forehead. Don’t worry. He was happy to be here. In the field, we sat with the old man and my mother. When I headed to the food table, she followed me.

  “That’s a lot of food for a second helping, Ailey. Aren’t you full? You had a big plate.”

  “It’s not for me. It’s for my man. He’s hungry.”

  “He can’t fix his own plate? I thought you were a feminist.”

  “I am. I’m just being polite to a guest.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, dating that boy. He’s definitely no Chris Tate.”

  “Chris wasn’t as nice as he seemed.”

  “At least he had some breeding.”

  “Careful, Mama. Your classism is showing.”

  “I had a dream about that boy Abdul. I saw his face and everything, but I didn’t even know he existed until you brought him here. Don’t you find that strange?”

  “I’m supposed to choose my lovers according to your dreams?”

  “Oh, you got lovers now? Excuse me, missy.” She began spooning large portions of greens onto the plate I was fixing. “You want that boy to be constipated? If you going to serve somebody, do it right.”