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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  When Gandee finished reading, he led her to the guest room, closed the door, and pulled off the fancy dress that Nana had bought her. Then he took off her bloomers, because she needed to take a bath. If she didn’t, she would stink. And they would bathe and play together in the water, and wouldn’t that be fun? He liked to bathe with her because she was so pretty and special. The most special little girl. Her hair was so shiny, and he loved her more than anybody else in the world. But despite all her specialness, Gandee still threatened to kill Coco, Mama, Daddy, even Nana, if she ever revealed their secret, what he did to her in the bathtub. Gandee was a doctor, he told her. He could kill everyone with poison, and no one would ever know.

  And every Sunday at dinner, he was charming and smiled at Lydia, calling her his pretty, special girl, as if he hadn’t threatened to destroy her life.

  * * *

  Lydia wouldn’t know it right away, but when her mother returned from New York, she had a baby inside her. In a few months, Mama’s dresses were tight around the middle. She was sick a lot, too, and she lost weight from the frequent vomiting. Daddy began to take the children to his parents’ every weekend. Some days, Lydia went shopping and her younger sister stayed back.

  There was nothing but boredom, walking beside Nana at the department store, but Lydia was relieved. That it was a day that Gandee wouldn’t probe her with his fingers and teach her how to touch and kiss him or make her look at pictures of men and women doing the thing her parents had done to bring her into the world.

  When the new baby was born, Mama was even more tired. She argued with Daddy, shouting, every time she turned around this dingy-ass apartment, there was nothing but children pulling on her. Was this all that she could expect in life? He was the one who’d wanted to have a third child. This hadn’t been her idea. She was supposed to be an educated woman; she wanted to do something more with her life. Lydia found this out by eavesdropping on her parents talking, and one evening, when she was supposed to be in bed, she learned that her father had killing on his mind as well.

  Her mother was complaining about the long hours Daddy worked, but he assured Mama he wasn’t cheating on her. He wouldn’t do that to her. He swore on everything he had. Daddy was only working for his family. He was trying to save for them to get a house. And he never thought he’d love anybody as much as he did his children.

  “Woman, I don’t know what I would do if a man hurt my girls. I’d murder him and go to the electric chair.”

  “How can you even joke about that? You know my brother died on the chain gang.”

  “I’m not. I’m serious.”

  “I’m not asking you to kill nobody. All I want is for you to help me with these kids. I’m tired, Geoff. If it wasn’t for Diane coming to babysit, I couldn’t even go the grocery store. Do you know I have to take the baby with me to the bathroom?”

  “I’m sorry, woman. I’ll try to do better.”

  Those years were tense, insecure, for a little girl, as Lydia considered what death meant. What Gandee had said, what her daddy said, and what telling of her pain would mean. No, not pain. Pain wasn’t a big enough word. Lydia had no vocabulary to capture what was happening to her. She only wanted it to stop. Once, when Lydia was seven and her new baby sister had started to crawl, Lydia had tried to find the words to tell her mama what her grandfather was doing, even though she didn’t want him to kill everybody in her family. That Gandee wasn’t like Mr. Rogers on the television, who was kind and calm and made Lydia feel safe. Like he was the real relative and not Gandee, even though Mr. Rogers was a white man. She loved Mr. Rogers, and she knew he loved her back, even though they had never met. She wished he could come visit her and tell her what to do, and she knew Mr. Rogers would never make her get naked in the tub. He was her friend, and his love made her strong enough to go into the kitchen that day to tell her mama what Gandee had been doing.

  Her mother was at the stove, stirring a pot of greens. It smelled funny in the kitchen, but that funny smell meant that dinner would be good: Lydia loved her mother’s greens.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, baby?”

  Her mother looked over her shoulder, and her face was streaked with water.

  “Why you crying?”

  Her mother let go of the spoon and wiped her face. “It’s all right, baby. Grown ladies get sad sometimes. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am . . . Mama?”

  “Yes, baby. What is it?” Her mother sighed. She had picked up the spoon again. In her other arm, she bounced Lydia’s baby sister, Ailey. Ailey was always crying. She seemed sad, too, and Lydia set aside her own feelings. The despair of her mother and her baby sister added up to more sadness than Lydia could contain, and her courage left her. She couldn’t hear Mr. Rogers in her head anymore. And so Lydia set aside her own feelings and asked to hold her baby sister, who was fat, with many rolls. Mama quickly handed her over, saying Lydia was her good girl. Her good little helper, and Lydia balanced the baby on her bony hip. She carried Ailey into the living room and sat with her. She put her nose at the top of Ailey’s head. It smelled good. Like peace or something near to it.

  From then on, Lydia liked to hold her baby sister on her thin thighs. Rocking, until the baby’s crying stopped. Her first word was to Lydia, as she grabbed hair: Mama. Lydia held on, dirging her way through the fall and winter and spring. Then in the summer, Mama’s father died, and Daddy drove them down to Chicasetta in his Cadillac because Mama wanted to see her father in his casket before they put him in the ground. In Chicasetta, everyone was crying, but Lydia wasn’t sad. She hadn’t ever met Grandpa Hosea, and there was quiet down south, peace like the perfume of her baby sister’s curls.

  Each year after that first one, her mother drove them south in her station wagon, and Lydia looked forward to those summers, to the playing in the heat that didn’t seem to tire her. To the laziness of the time. At the height of the day, when the sun was too hurtful, Lydia would sit on the living room floor. She cut out dresses for her dolls as her great-grandmother gave her instructions. Dear Pearl sat on the couch because her knees were bad. They wouldn’t let her get up again if she got down that low.

  As summers passed, Dear Pearl showed Lydia how to make clothes for real people. She took an old dress, plucking at the thread. She mixed up the pieces and told Lydia to close her eyes. Could she see how to fit the pieces back together? And somehow, yes, Lydia could. The old lady was grouchy with everyone else, but she told Lydia that she was a real smart girl. Dear Pearl’s own mama had taught her the trick of taking a dress and pulling it inside out. To look at the seams and how each piece joined together and figure out how to make another one. Dear Pearl’s own daughter and granddaughter couldn’t master that trick, but see how Lydia could do that? And soon, she learned how to cut out her own dress patterns from brown paper bags, because her great-grandmother insisted a woman who knew how to sew could always make her own money, selling to another woman who didn’t know. And that meant Lydia would never go hungry, not one day in her life.

  There was dinner in the evenings, and Mama had to take Coco into another room and whisper to her that it was not nice to make faces at the pinto beans and corn bread and greens someone had kindly prepared for us. It was polite to eat whatever was placed before us, so eat it, damnit, and don’t say another word about it. And now that Mama thought about it, don’t be looking around at the wallpaper while somebody asked the blessing, like Coco didn’t know any better. Bow her head instead. After the meal, the peeling of peaches and tomatoes, then helping the older women piece together quilts in the evenings. Or there was a long walk. Dear Pearl stayed back at the house while Miss Rose and Mama and Lydia and her two sisters headed off, until Ailey got tired and wanted to be carried. Lydia let her mother tote her baby sister, though, because she liked to run in the open spaces. She was unaccustomed to not having to look both ways and watching out for cars and having Mama tell them, come back here right now.

  “I s
ure wish you would move into town with Uncle Root,” her mother said one night. “It’s too quiet out here.”

  “I like it out here,” Miss Rose said. “This my home.”

  “There’s too many ghosts on this place for me. Dead Indians. Dead slaves. And what if somebody comes out here to mess with you and Dear Pearl? Norman don’t even live in yelling distance.”

  “Then I got something for them. They gone get a chest full of what’s in my rifle. I ain’t scared of nobody. I’m grown. And I like my ghosts. I like looking up and seeing the same sky my people seen all them years before me. It kinda make me want to pray. Don’t you laugh at me.”

  “How you mean? I’m not laughing at you.”

  “I love this place, even if my own child had to run away.”

  “I didn’t run. I went to college, and I married Geoff. You make me sound like a fugitive from justice.”

  “You went to college right down the road. You coulda came back here and married somebody else.”

  Mama snorted. “You mean, if I hadn’t gotten pregnant?”

  Miss Rose laughed. “You know what I mean! You had plenty boys you coulda married. Like that Wilt Monroe. Remember him? He sure was sweet on you.”

  “That’s who you wanted me to marry?”

  “He came from a decent Christian home.”

  “Mm-hmm. Christian enough to try to get me to go in the bushes with him, behind school. You didn’t know that, did you? And he was ugly and had that funny-shaped head, too.”

  Miss Rose tapped her daughter’s arm, but playfully. “You the Devil, Maybelle Lee Driskell!”

  “No, I ain’t, neither!”

  They laughed and nudged shoulders, and in the darkness, Lydia had looked up at the sky. She thought she could see every star there was. Was this the same sky her daddy could see, up in the City? Somehow, her granny’s sky seemed bigger. If she stayed here, if she hid in the woods, she could sleep under this sky. It would keep her safe, but then her mother was calling.

  “Y’all girls come on. It’s time to go inside and go to bed,” and the little girls made sounds of protest. They weren’t sleepy. Then Miss Rose was saying they should mind they mama. But take her hands and walk with her. She didn’t want them to get lost out here.

  The Night I Fell in Love

  When Lydia met the young man who would become her husband, he made the mistake of commenting on her looks. He’d almost lost his chance with those three words she’d heard too many times.

  “Hey, pretty girl.”

  “Don’t call me that.” She’d turned her back on the young man, flipping her hair over her shoulder. Most Black folks didn’t like that gesture, and she didn’t use it often. Only when she wanted to be rude on purpose. To make a point that she knew what people thought of her. High-yellow girl. Siddity heifer. She felt her anger rise, like a bear moving in a cave, ready to come out. Ready to attack.

  It was Lydia’s sophomore year of Routledge College, and she’d ridden in a car packed with her sorority sisters to Atlanta for the Morehouse basketball game, but none of them wanted to see who won. They’d crossed over for Beta the week before and were anxious to show off in their orange-and-white jackets with their line names printed on the back. To make their Beta call to their sisters from the Spelman chapter and maybe score some numbers from cute Morehouse dudes.

  Lydia was excited. It was her first trip to Atlanta without her family. She was feeling grown, until she walked into the humid brew of the gym. A November night but hotter than July in that gym. She made a move to pull off her jacket, and her line sister put a hand on her arm.

  “Leave it on,” Niecy said.

  “But I’m hot, girl,” Lydia said.

  “Soror, everybody else kept theirs on. You want to look ashamed of Beta?”

  Niecy was her roommate, too. When they’d pledged for Beta, they’d had a hard time avoiding their big sisters, because she’d opened the door every time a Beta member knocked, even when Lydia told her, stay quiet. Don’t move. Since they’d crossed “the burning sands,” Niecy used every excuse to mention their new status in conversation. It was “soror this” and “soror that,” and it was getting on Lydia’s nerves, because her roommate barely had squeaked into the sorority. Her grades had been high, but Niecy was short and chubby, and the Betas were notorious about uniformity on their lines.

  Lydia sat on the bleacher, sweating. The air was so thick, it felt like a hand on her throat, and her curls were falling, too. She’d done a wet set with gel, but the steam was attacking her look. She tapped Niecy’s knee. She was going to get a hot dog. Did Niecy want one? As soon as Lydia left the gym, she took off her jacket.

  At the concession stand, there was a guy trying to flirt. Saying the wrong things, though he was good-looking. Tall, very slender, a chocolate brother with real smooth skin. Too handsome and well groomed for Lydia’s taste, like he spent a lot of time in front of the mirror. He wore a blue velvet tracksuit with the jacket unzipped to reveal his white T-shirt. A white Kangol cap like he thought he was LL Cool J. Those gold chains around his neck: ’Bama with a capital B.

  When Lydia flipped her hair, the guy told her, be careful. She didn’t want that wig to fall off.

  She turned back, outraged. “This is my own hair!”

  “Yeah, it’s yours, if you bought it.” He looked so serious, she didn’t know he was teasing, until he asked her, could he have one of her hot dogs? She let him move closer. She guessed he was all right.

  “You got a dollar?”

  “Aw, that’s cold, woman! They don’t cost but seventy-five cents apiece.”

  “I’m trying to make a profit. Times are tough these days.”

  “You kinda skinny to be eating four hot dogs.” He lifted her wrist, but she didn’t pull away. His touch was warm.

  “I’m a little piece of leather, but well put together.”

  He threw back his head, laughing. He told her his name—Dante Anderson—and wanted to know, where was she from? She sounded proper, but didn’t nobody say stuff like that, unless they were from the country. Lydia told him, she was from up north, from the City, but her mother’s people lived in Chicasetta. She gave him her name but wouldn’t give him her phone number.

  “Chicasetta? So your people from the country, then. I bet you can burn. You know how to fry pork chops . . . Lydia?”

  “Damn, brother, you must be hungry! First you want my hot hogs. Now you looking for a home-cooked meal.”

  He laughed again, and moved forward in the line with her, though his friend was motioning, it was time to leave. That was his partner over there, Tim. His ace boon coon—but let him get back to her. Dante liked her style, the way she carried herself. Tough but sweet. Couldn’t nobody put nothing over on her, and Lydia smiled, finally. They kept talking, even after her order came, and he asked for her phone number again. He wanted to talk to her some more, and so she gave him the number to her dormitory, plus her last name. By that time, the hot dogs she’d ordered were cold, so she went to the back of the line, and he walked with her. They talked some more.

  He didn’t wait long to call her, only a day. She heard her name called on her floor.

  “Lydia Garfield, telephone! Lydia Garfield, telephone!”

  She didn’t answer, though she’d already dreamed about Dante. That they sat together on her granny’s plastic-covered sofa. Laughing and talking, like familiar home folk. It scared her, the vividness of that dream.

  Dante called again that weekend, but she ignored her name. The Monday after that, she returned from dinner at the refectory, and the desk monitor handed her several pink message slips. She told Lydia, she must have put something strong on that guy, because he’d called the dormitory’s main number three different times. That night when she heard her name on the floor, Lydia went to the phone, but he didn’t sound urgent. Just happy to hear her voice. He’d been thinking about her. Had she thought about him, too?

  “No, I’ve been too busy.”

  “You
lying, Lydia, but I’ma let you slide.” He laughed, an easy sound, and she leaned against the wall, cradling the phone. She forgot the time until he told her he should stop running up his mama’s bill. But he called a few days later, and in two weeks, they had settled into a rhythm: he called every night, and they talked for ten minutes. He told her how much he had been thinking about her, and she avoided saying the same.

  Another two weeks after that, he offered to drive to campus and visit her, but she refused. People were nosy. She didn’t want the campus gossips all up in her business.

  “You shamed of me, Lydia?”

  “For what? You’re not my man.”

  “Not yet. Wait a minute. I’ma be right back. Don’t go nowhere, okay?”

  There were the strains of Luther Vandross, singing about the night he fell in love. Dante sang along, and his tenor wasn’t bad. Better than Mr. J.W.’s singing, down in her family church, though that wasn’t saying much. Mr. J.W. sure was an awful singer. At the end of the call, Dante invited her to his mother’s church in Atlanta. He went to church every Sunday, and he could drive to fetch her, and take her back. He wanted his mama to meet her, but Lydia told him, no, she could drive herself. Give her the address. She would meet them there.

  That Sunday morning, when Lydia drove down the highway on the way to the interstate, she wore a dress she’d sewn herself. A modest frock that covered her arms, bosom, and knees. She was nervous: the road that led to the highway went right past the turnoff to her granny’s house. She hoped she wouldn’t pass anybody she knew along the way. A friend or relative, who’d want to know, why wasn’t Lydia attending her family church that morning? Couldn’t she praise the Lord among her own?

  Dante’s wasn’t a big church. It was in a storefront in a strip mall in southwest Atlanta, but his mother was dressed as if it were already Easter. Miss Opal was tall and slender like her son, and wore a purple print dress, and an ostentatious purple hat that looked to be a foot tall. Dante had on a black suit; his tie matched his mother’s hat. When the collection plate came around, he put a twenty on top of the single bills. Weeks later, when Lydia would laugh, accusing him of showing off, he’d quote from scripture. That Genesis said you were supposed to tithe. Second Corinthians, too.