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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  “Child, how you sound? It’s your home! Of course you can come. And any guest you’d like to bring is surely welcome, too. Like this young man you’re keeping company with. Miss Rose told me y’all went riding through Chicasetta. You know you can’t keep no secrets in the country.”

  “Um, yeah, Mama. I want to bring that guy. His name is Dante. I guess he’s my boyfriend.”

  “Y’all come on, if you coming. I’ll set out an extra plate.”

  It would be a short trip, only two days. Dante couldn’t take off more than that. Not with his hours at the convenience story already cut off, though he’d started fixing cars in the apartment complex, too. Only small tasks, such as changing oil and flushing carburetors. He couldn’t do engine work. He had to find a space and a lift for that.

  The Monday before Thanksgiving, Lydia gave Mrs. Stripling a sad face. Her family was continuing to have a hard time, and she was going to drive to the City early to see what she could do. Instead, Lydia spent Tuesday washing clothes. Frying chicken for the journey, though Dante told her they could just stop somewhere to eat. It was only an eight-hour drive. On Wednesday night, Lydia packed their bags, then went into the bathroom to smoke her magic joint. She didn’t know Dante was in the apartment until he knocked on the bathroom door. When she came out, he told her she’d have to leave her weed behind, in case the cops stopped them on the interstate.

  They drove through the night. When they arrived in the City, it was broad morning. They parked on the street in front of the house, and Lydia let them in with her key, calling. Dante put their suitcase down. He stood fidgeting by the staircase, until Lydia took his hand and led him into the kitchen. Her father was at the table, eating his breakfast. Her sisters were there, too. Ailey hopped up and hugged her, and Lydia held on to her, rocking.

  Mama told everyone, move over and make room. They had a guest. In an hour, she was testing Dante, saying he had to sleep in the basement. He was a worthy opponent, though: he didn’t mind at all, and Mama nodded. At least this boy had manners. And Lydia was relieved. It would be fine. She’d made the right decision. She relaxed as her aunt and uncle arrived with her cousins. Lots of hugs and kisses, though whenever someone tried to start a conversation with Dante, Lydia interrupted with her charm. His grammar wasn’t the best, and while Lydia didn’t care, she knew her mother would notice.

  Then Nana arrived. She had a key but refused to use it. She rang the doorbell once and then twice, and Lydia let her in.

  “Hello, dear.” She handed her granddaughter her purse and that damned plate of cookies. After so many years, you’d think she would have learned to make something else.

  “Hey, Nana. How are you?”

  “I’m very well.”

  Such a short exchange, but the anger roused in Lydia. The rage she forgot was there, her bear asleep in its cave. Lydia tried to coax the rage back to a darkened, calm place. She almost succeeded, until dinner was served, and Nana began telling stories about Gandee. What a kind man he’d been, when he’d been alive. She went on, extolling Gandee’s virtues, and Lydia started trembling ever so faintly, remembering her times with her grandfather in the tub. How he had pushed her head down to his groin, and when she cried, he’d reminded her of what would happen if she didn’t do what he said. That death was the result of disobedience.

  “Excuse me,” Lydia said. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Nana, but I have an announcement. Dante and I are married, and I’ve moved to Atlanta! And I transferred to Spelman so I could be with him, across the street from Morehouse!”

  Under the table, the husband tried to grab her hand. This wasn’t what they had discussed, but Lydia pushed him away. She went into her charming routine: she was back in control. Her bear was awake but that was fine. She was the bear, but no one else knew it. She watched Nana’s displeasure as no one paid attention to her anymore. How Nana plucked at the edge of her napkin and grew smaller in her chair.

  Nana was easy. She had been vanquished. It was Mama who frightened Lydia when she lost control, shouting about how she hadn’t wanted to marry Lydia’s father.

  That night, Lydia told Dante she had to take a shower. But she took her purse with her. After she locked the door, she pulled out the pipe that Tim had given her. She couldn’t smoke a primo in her parents’ house; everyone would smell the weed. So she turned on the shower and sat on the toilet seat. When she lit the crack rock and pulled the smoke through the pipe, the happiness filled her veins. She didn’t care about what her mother thought about her husband. Or what Dante thought about her. She only wanted to sit on this toilet and inhale this smoke. When she finished smoking, she put the pipe back in her purse, stripped, and took a shower. She rinsed her mouth out with toothpaste.

  Her mother was pleasant to Dante in the morning. She made him a big breakfast and handed him two plastic containers filled with Thanksgiving leftovers. She had wrapped an entire pie for him, too, but no banana pudding for Lydia. That was the only indication of her mother’s hurt feelings.

  At the door, she pulled Lydia aside and held out a spiral notebook. Write down her new phone number and address. Then Mama leaned in and whispered, she was putting a little extra money in Lydia’s mad fund. Every married woman needed something, in case she ever had to leave. Lydia thanked her but was insulted by the implication. The bear roused in the cave, but Lydia gentled it back to sleep: she’d given her mother the wrong contact information.

  * * *

  In Georgia, the weather chilled permanently. That December, Lydia packed up her belongings in her dorm room, but she didn’t tell Niecy that she wasn’t returning in January. She didn’t want to provide any explanation. She didn’t want to be away from her husband anymore. When the holidays arrived, as Lydia decorated a tree and bought presents for Dante, she thought of her grandfather. How Christmas used to be the worst time of the year, back when she was a little girl. During the holidays, Mama would drop her children off at her in-laws’ house nearly every day. Gandee would take off time from his practice, and Nana would go shopping for her granddaughters. She would splurge on beautiful dresses for them, frocks made from satin and taffeta with many ribbons, and tell them to act nice and be pretty.

  Thinking about her daily holiday baths with Gandee made Lydia sad. She craved her rocks even more: since her trip to the City, she had given up the pretense of primos. Now she paged Tim twice a week. She smoked a rock after Dante was sleep, which lasted her into the morning, when she tried not to show her impatience with him as she sent him off when his own pager buzzed.

  But there was the night when she sneaked into the room where Dante was sleeping. She picked up her pocketbook and gently closed the door behind her. In the bathroom, she slipped the rock and the pipe from her bag, and there was nothing between that cloudy diamond and her. The smoke. The smoke. The smoke. The smoke. Yesyesyesyesyesyes. She was putting her hand in her panties and touching herself and she was coming. She was the bear in the cave and she was standing on her hind legs and nothing could kill her but there was a roaring and it was Dante. He knocked the pipe from her hand, but Lydia wasn’t angry. She had sucked up all the smoke.

  She tried to speak, but the words in her mouth didn’t match what was in her head. She couldn’t fit the understanding to the movement, but she didn’t care because there was pleasure and she was alive and by the time she came down, Dante was pulling the blanket off the bed and telling Lydia he would sleep in his car.

  When dawn came, she was back to herself and feeling ashamed. Her husband had found her smoking crack and touching herself. She didn’t know how to make that better, but she showered and washed her hair. She wanted to be squeaky clean, a different woman from the one he’d seen the previous night. And she prayed, too. It had been a long time for her since she’d sent up some words or given gratitude. She and Dante hadn’t been to church since he’d started working for Tim. Those long Friday and Saturday nights had tired him out; he didn’t have the energy on Sunday morning.

  Lydia wa
s standing at the counter with her eyes closed, begging God to save her marriage, when Dante came up behind her. He hugged her, and whispered, sit down with him. Eat some breakfast, but her appetite was gone. Her plate turned cold.

  He touched her hand. “This is my fault, baby.”

  “Dante, no—”

  “Yeah, it is. I brought this to you. You not used to this life. This ain’t you. And really, it ain’t me, neither.”

  “I don’t know what happened, Dante. It just got away from me.”

  “That’s what happens, baby. I tried to tell you, but we gone stop this, right now. I been saving, and I almost got enough for mechanic’s school. A couple more months is all I need. And I think you should go to the City to your family—”

  “What? You want me gone?” So her prayers hadn’t been answered. He didn’t want her anymore. Her words sent above had been returned with ashes.

  “No, Lydia, I don’t want you gone. I love you, baby. But you can’t be around this kind of life no more. So what we gone do is, you going home, and you gone get yourself together. And then I’m gone save, and I’m gone get another place in another neighborhood—”

  “Dante—”

  “No, woman. I’m not changing my mind. I’m gone take this weekend off. We gone drive your car up to the City and I’m gone take the bus back. That’s what’s gone happen.”

  He was no longer the soft boy that she had met at the basketball game. His voice had deepened. Even his face had changed, with lines that had not been there before. Perhaps he’d never been that boy, but always a man with the bitterness of strength, taking charge of the weaker beings in his sphere. And Lydia was weak. Once, she’d dreamed about being taken care of by this man. But this care didn’t have the sugared taste she’d imagined.

  When he left, she tried to spend her day as she had before, in the mindless months when Dante and she had played house. But time had sped up, and the apartment was clean and there was nothing else to do. She tried not to think of the cloudy diamonds in her purse, the ones that called to her. She rode the minutes until they became an hour, and she was suffering. On the second hour, she broke.

  She went to her pocketbook, but there was nothing there. She searched the compartments, pulling out the lining. Then she went to Dante’s drawer, moving the clothes she had neatly folded. She ran her hands inside the edges of the drawer, but there was nothing. And she shook and cried and thought of what she would say to Dante to make him give her a rock. Just one, but he did not return, and Lydia didn’t know which was worse, Dante leaving her or that she had torn up the apartment and found no rocks.

  He was gone all night, and in the morning, there was a knock. She ran to the door. She hadn’t slept. Every time she’d dozed, her heart had pounded, and she would cry out and she was afraid of sleep. But now Dante had come back. He would make things better, he would give her a rock, and she would do anything he asked to get it. But it wasn’t Dante knocking because he had forgotten his key. It was Tim, and he was telling Lydia that her husband was dead. And Lydia was wailing as she slipped to the floor. As she beat her fists against the carpet.

  Tim kept talking over her cries. He had seen the whole thing. He’d been coming to the back of the convenience store, where the owner didn’t have cameras, and that geek monster Marcus had pulled a gun on Dante. He had been begging, just give it to him. He didn’t have any money, but he would soon. So just give it to him, please, brother, please, he was good for it, but when Dante shook his head, Marcus shot him. He’d been searching Dante’s body when Tim had walked up. There wasn’t anybody around, so he shot the geek monster in the head.

  Tim pulled a wad of money out of his pockets. “Here you go. This all my boy had.”

  When she didn’t take the money, he started for the door. She was still weeping, but she couldn’t stop herself. She’d gone too long without. She needed something.

  “Wait,” she said. “Did Dante have anything else on him?”

  Tim turned. “Say what?”

  She wiped her face. “You know. Like . . . you know?”

  At least Tim didn’t smile when he reached again into his pocket for the cellophane packets. And there was another pipe, if she needed it. He was grim as he said he’d get at her. He’d come back and check on her soon.

  Before calling Dante’s mother, Lydia smoked a rock, but Miss Opal already had heard the news. She was screaming, her only baby dead. Why, Jesus? Why? And Lydia told her she was sorry, but Miss Opal didn’t have to worry. She had enough to bury Dante.

  “We had policies, just in case. It’s only four thousand. I got a little bit more in my emergency fund, though.”

  “Baby, that’s all right. That’s more than enough. I just thank you so much.”

  “Don’t say that, Miss Opal. It’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m his wife. Was . . . his wife.”

  After she hung up, she smoked another rock, and another one that night, because she couldn’t be high in the morning when she drove to the apartment of her husband’s mother and signed over the policy to bury her son. And she’d have to sit there for a while, too, and hold Miss Opal’s hand and listen to her cry. Lydia couldn’t allow her own grief to take over, because the woman who had carried him needed to be honored. That was the old way, and besides, Lydia had to find the words to tell Miss Opal she wouldn’t be at the homegoing. She couldn’t see Dante in his coffin. She’d been to enough funerals in Chicasetta. Lydia didn’t want to see Dante powdered and stiff, maybe even with a grin on his face, as some bereaved families requested for their departed. They wanted their loved ones to look jolly on their way to meet Jesus.

  She stayed in the apartment, smoking up what Tim had given her, and when that ran out, she called Tim and gave him her gold wedding band as payment. In two weeks, the furniture was gone, carted out in pieces by Tim. The television. The stereo. The pots and pans because she didn’t feel like cooking and Tim would bring her candy and pop when he came by. She kept her clothes. She couldn’t walk around naked, but finally, she offered Tim the car. That should buy her enough for a month, but he told her he didn’t need that. He already had his own.

  “What do you want? Oh! I got the cassettes!”

  She ran to the bedroom closet and pulled down the shoe box. She came and set it on the kitchen counter.

  “It’s some good stuff in here. I got Shalimar—old Shalimar, not new Shalimar—and I got Cameo.” She put the Luther Vandross tapes aside.

  Tim put his hand on hers and curled the fingers around. She slipped her hand from his, and pulled more cassettes from the shoe box, but he told her, he wanted her for his woman. She was a lady, not one of these crack hoes, sucking dick for anybody with five dollars. That’s why Dante had married her, and Tim wasn’t even mad at her for coming between him and his partner. That Dante had cussed Tim out, saying he’d gotten Lydia hooked on crack.

  He pulled the plastic bag from his pocket and opened it. He shook a rock onto the counter. She told him, leave that, and come back in a couple of hours. But then he picked up the rock from the counter, and she knew her gamble hadn’t worked.

  When he came in for a kiss, she pushed at his chest.

  “I’m not my best right now. I need to take a shower. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

  “That’s why I like you,” Tim said. “’Cause you say things like that. Dante was right about you. You’re a real good woman.”

  After her shower, she dressed and braided her wet hair. She was grateful she still had a working phone: when she called her granny, there was no scolding or yelling about where Lydia had been, all this time. Miss Rose only told her granddaughter, come on, if she was coming, and Lydia took down her suitcase from the closet. She put her clothes and cassettes inside the suitcase. When she walked out of the apartment, she left the door unlocked. It was dark as she turned off toward Chicasetta, but she wasn’t afraid of the country roads.

  At the farm, the porchlight was on, and Miss Rose was sitting on the porch. Lydia went to her
and sat by her feet. She put her head on the familiar, fleshy leg, and her granny touched her hair. Then, she told Lydia, it was time to call her mother. She had been worrying herself sick, but Lydia shouldn’t be scared. Everything was gone be all right.

  My Sensitivity Gets in the Way

  Though no one used the term, there had been folks in Chicasetta who could be called “addicts.” For instance, there was Mr. Lonny the Wino. When he stood in front of the liquor store, sweeping the same patch of sidewalk, he was usually placid. But if he’d imbibed more than his share, Lonny’s personality would turn. He would block the entrance of the liquor store, snarling.

  “Got-damn bastards! I’m coming for all y’all! You better watch out! I got something for you!”

  Mr. Hurt, the owner of the store, would come outside, waving a baseball bat. “Go on, now,” he’d say. “I can’t have that mess ’round here. Go on.” And Lonny would amble down the street to return the next day, smiling affably, revealing toothless gums. He’d been a schoolteacher once, at Chicasetta Colored High School. A quiet man who dressed neatly, he’d taught math to his students, trying to explain the concepts of proofs and oddly shaped geometrical figures. It was a woman who had caused his fall, or rather, a girl. One of his students in eleventh grade who’d been too pretty for Lonny to resist. That’s what the men in town had said when the girl had reported Lonny to the principal. He’d touched her hair, before grabbing her and tearing her clothes. She’d kicked him in the privates before running away.

  Too pretty, the men said, and what man could resist such a female? Skin so smooth and a body tight in all the right places. An ass you could set a drink on, and it would never fall. Big old pretty brown eyes with shiny whites. But the women said, Lonny was a pervert who couldn’t keep his hands off underage girls. Nasty bastard, and him with a wife at home, though soon, the wife packed up her children and left town. Lonny started drinking, and the rest of the story tumbled out, along with his teeth each passing year.