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

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  Crack was different from liquor, though. It was irresistible, and those who smoked it quickly became shameless in their need. At first, it was in the northern cities, like at that house with boarded windows around the corner from where Lydia had attended Jean Toomer High School. The people who walked in and out of that house looked awful. Their lips chapped and eternally ashy. Their eyes bugged and staring at something that they could only reach once they had smoked another rock or two. When crack traveled from the urban Sodom to the country, it began holding its own with liquor. Folks who’d kept to themselves, avoiding the fast life, couldn’t get enough of it. The pull was legendary: once you smoked it, you couldn’t turn it down. But the danger only made it more seductive.

  You could smell it on the skin, that metallic odor. That’s what Miss Rose had remembered, the day a stranger came by the farm. She shouldn’t have opened the door for him, but the man looked awful. Skinny, clothes not clean. She took pity on him, offering him a meal, but made the mistake of leaving him in the kitchen while she visited the bathroom. It didn’t take that long for Miss Rose to do her business, and she had sense enough to take her purse with her. When she returned, that man had run off with the plate she fixed him, and he’d stolen two hens out her deep freezer, too. Miss Rose wasn’t angry at the man. She prayed for him that evening, because she could see that he’d had some pain in his life. Something pushing him to the edge.

  Yet Lydia’s fall was a mystery to her family. A girl like her, provided with every necessity, a mother and father, plenty love. Educated at college and on her way to becoming a social worker. A good girl like that. What had gone wrong? And when Lydia reflected on her life, meditated on it, the way Elder Beasley at Red Mound told his flock that they should meditate on Jesus, think about His suffering, how He toted the troubles of the world so the rest of human beings didn’t have to, Lydia couldn’t have told you how she had ended up in the thrall of a white rock that looked harmless. The pellets like cheap jewelry, cloudy diamonds that somebody tried to pass off as priceless. They didn’t look like something that could ruin Lydia’s life. That could make her family ashamed to call her name out loud in polite company, make her mother feel as if her heart had been stolen and carried off to Hell.

  It had been frightening for Lydia, phoning her mother. Ringing the house at nine thirty, so there would be no harmless chitchat. A call that time of night could only mean a death or an emergency. Lydia took it as a sign when her baby sister answered the phone, though there were only seconds of hearing Ailey’s voice before Mama snatched the phone away. Lydia told her she was in trouble. She’d gotten in with a bad crowd. And when Mama pressed her, she admitted, yes, it was drugs. By that time, Lydia was shaking. She only wanted her need to stop. Her grief to stop. Only her granny’s hand on her shoulder was keeping her from screaming.

  But it was a relief, knowing Ailey was still there, waiting. Loving her. Lydia closed her eyes and kept Ailey’s face in front of her, as she lay in the bed that she had shared with her baby sister only the summer before. Tried to remember that when her mother arrived at Miss Rose’s house the next evening. Her uncle collected her mother from the airport in Atlanta, and at dinner, Lydia knew there would be no respite.

  “I knew something was wrong with that nigger,” Mama said. “I had a dream.”

  “This ain’t the time to be bringing all that up,” Miss Rose said. “Let the child be. She already upset.”

  “Don’t you think I see that? She’s my daughter, not yours!”

  Lydia sat at the kitchen table. Her plate untouched. An old quilt of her great-grandmother wrapped around her shoulders. When her mother asked, where was that boy, now that he’d gotten her hooked on drugs? Lydia trembled in her misery. She lied that Dante had broken up with her. She lied, because if Mama kept low-rating Dante even after she found out he was dead, Lydia definitely would hate her.

  For the next few days, Lydia walked over the wood floors of her granny’s house. Her mother would call her name, a noise Lydia didn’t truly hear, because she was focused on getting from one minute to the next. She couldn’t stop shaking, and her heart raced, like she had drunk too much coffee. She wanted to scream: she bit her lips to keep the sound in, until she tasted blood. Then she told herself, lie down. Maybe some rest would do her good, but when she closed her eyes, a strange dream—

  Always, the same handsome white man in old-fashioned clothes. A man with eyes like Uncle Root, but the man was a stranger, who led her to a gingerbread house like in a fairy tale. Lydia could even smell the gingerbread. It made her mouth water, but when she walked inside the fairy-tale house, there was nothing but claw-foot tubs, and little girls standing beside them. Little, light-brown girls dressed like the dolls Lydia’s granny kept on her bed. Little girls wearing dresses with lace and petticoats, and grown women’s buns fastened at the back of their necks, and then the little girls stepped into the bathtubs and lay back and closed their eyes and the water closed over their heads—

  “Lydia, baby, come on now. It’s time to get up.”

  Her mother was calling her name, telling her she should take a bath and get herself cleaned up. Lydia hesitated at the door, until Mama told her she’d sit in there with her, right on the blue fluffy toilet cover. She thought her daughter might want her privacy while she bathed, but if she didn’t that was all right. She was Lydia’s mother. She’d seen everything she had already. Mama laughed. After Lydia’s bath Mama helped her dress in clean underwear and a bra and then a shirt and jeans. She kneeled down and slipped socks and tennis shoes on her daughter’s feet. She weaved Lydia’s hair into four long braids.

  Uncle Root was with them for the drive to Atlanta, past the city and out to one of the counties where only white folk lived. A building that sprawled, and a white lady at the front desk who said that Lydia had to sign the forms herself. She was an adult, and Mama was hugging her, and Uncle Root was hugging her, and the white lady at the front desk was taking her back through the doors. She introduced herself as Dr. Fairland, and apologized for patting Lydia down and told her she had to go behind that curtain and take off all her clothes, so they knew she wasn’t bringing drugs into the facility. Please forgive her, and Dr. Fairland had to search through Lydia’s suitcase, too. But she had a smile in her voice as she stuck her hand through the curtain with Lydia’s clothes and underwear. She told Lydia that she was so proud of her. No contraband. This was a great first step! And she sounded even happier when Lydia asked, could she have some juice or maybe something to eat? She was really hungry.

  * * *

  In their early days, when the patients came into the center and were detoxing, some wept, giving over to depression. Others wanted to fight, and they jumped at the television, the only valuable object in the room. When days passed, their shame would tip into the space. In group therapy, the patients would repeat their apologies to the counselor. “I’m sorry” and “I didn’t mean it,” and Dr. Fairland would nod sympathetically. She was in charge of Lydia’s group, one of four in the center. She was Lydia’s personal counselor, too. It wasn’t enough to have a daily group therapy. There had to be one-on-one confessions as well, and she listened to Lydia’s issues for sixty minutes every day. The lack of sleep. No privacy. That strange, red-haired chick who was Lydia’s roommate and asked her throughout the day, did Lydia want to hear about her soul, in that candy-coated southern drawl.

  About halfway through her monologue, Dr. Fairland would ask, “Why do you think you did it, Lydia? Why’d you start using drugs?” Lydia envisaged her trying not to look at her watch, calculating how much money this crack fiend was providing for her mortgage and car note. The facility was nice. She knew her parents were paying plenty money.

  After her cravings and panic attacks stopped, she was relieved. But when she was forced to confront her feelings, her cravings started again. So Lydia kept quiet in group therapy, and watched the other patients, a passive witness. Except for one Black guy, the rest of the patients were white, and
open with their agony, their anger, though Lydia had been raised to keep her composure around white people, to never drop her guard. Just because she was addicted to crack didn’t mean she had an excuse to forget her home training and act any kind of way in front of these people. It had taken her five days in the group session to admit that she was an addict. On that day, she quietly stated, yes, it was true. She had been far gone, after only a few weeks of smoking primos, before she moved on to rocks.

  There was approval around the circle, even from that one Black guy whom Lydia had nicknamed “Brother Patient” in her mind. When Lydia had casually called him “brother” during the snack break, letting her cadence move into a rhythm, he’d looked at her, his eyes surprised, then assessing. The look of recognition: he saw it now. That she was a Black woman and not Puerto Rican, or maybe from the southern part of Italy. Then his eyes moved past her to another spot. He wasn’t interested in communion. He’d thought he’d bumped into something strange, but now he wanted to get away from the familiar. But Brother Patient did give her a grudging smile. A quick nod. That’s right. Lydia was doing the work. Good for her.

  * * *

  In her second week, Dr. Fairland asked her, had something happened? Lydia picked up the pillow and sat it on her lap. She picked at the corners; the seams weren’t reinforced. In a year, maybe less, the stuffing would start to come out.

  “My parents, they had to get married,” Lydia said. “Because of me. My mama got pregnant in college. She had wanted to be an English professor. She was supposed to get her master’s and then her doctorate.”

  “Okay.” Dr. Fairland’s hair was a mess, a wild brown perm that went everywhere. Her eyes were pretty, even though Lydia rarely liked light eyes, even her own.

  “And my mama was headed to Columbia,” Lydia said. “But then she couldn’t go. So she couldn’t get her doctorate and be a professor. It was even a long time before she started teaching elementary school. And when I was little, she was mad a lot. Like constantly.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He’s a doctor. And he’s gone all the time, working. I know he had to work to support us. I know that’s what a man is supposed to do, but when I was little, I felt like I was all by myself. Except for my baby sister.”

  “Did you think that was your fault, Lydia? That your mother was mad?”

  “Yeah, it is.” Lydia sat up. She corrected her diction. “I mean, yes, of course, it’s my fault. If it hadn’t been for me, Mama would be a professor right now. And now, here I am. In here.” Lydia waved her hand. “Her whole life was ruined because of me. She married Daddy because of me.”

  “But you didn’t ask to be born. Your parents were adults when they conceived you. All right, yes, they didn’t plan you, but they knew that having sex might result in a baby. And how can a baby be responsible for her parents?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Essentially you did, Lydia. You said it was your fault they had to get married. Why do you think you feel so protective of your parents, especially your mother?”

  “I mean . . . you know . . . the Bible says, honor thy mother and father and all that.”

  Dr. Fairland smiled. “Uh-oh! I’m not stepping into that minefield.”

  “I’m not trying be religious. I’m talking about how I was reared.”

  “And how was that?”

  How to explain what it was like to be Black to this white woman who wasn’t even southern? That a Black child didn’t have a right to hate their Black mama? Hatred was not allowed against your parents, no matter what had happened. You had to forgive your parents for whatever they had done even if they’d never apologized, because everybody had to stay together. So much had been lost already to Black folks.

  * * *

  In her third week, Lydia told Dr. Fairland what Gandee had done, the things he had made her do. She didn’t want to—she couldn’t even understand why she’d told—but she began weeping, and Dr. Fairland let her cry it out, her face sympathetic.

  Gently, she asked, had Lydia ever told her parents?

  “Oh, no. I could never.”

  “Why not, Lydia? Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know. I just couldn’t.”

  “Do you think you’ve never told because you feel responsible for them, especially your mother?”

  Lydia wiped her face. “I don’t want to hurt Mama even more. How am I supposed to tell her, that man molested me, when I’m already here? That’s bad enough.”

  “So instead, you have to carry all this by yourself? That’s a lot for somebody who’s only twenty-one years old. Doesn’t that get heavy for you?”

  New tears surged. “It does! I’m so tired, Dr. Fairland.”

  “I bet. And you have a right to be. You have a right to be sad, too. Do you know that? You have every right to every feeling that you have. You don’t have to feel guilty or apologize.”

  They talked some more, until the sixty minutes were up, but still, Lydia didn’t confess that her husband was dead.

  * * *

  The rehab facility let Mama visit in the fourth week, and Lydia confessed she’d lied about Dante being in college, because she’d been sure he’d enroll in college at some point. She came clean that she hadn’t transferred to Spelman, though her mother already knew that. They sat on the couch in Dr. Fairland’s office, half facing each other. Lydia with the pillow on her lap, and her mother hugging her pocketbook. Dr. Fairland was quiet, waiting for them to begin.

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m supposed to talk this whole thing through, but I don’t even like hearing that boy’s name.” Mama used her schoolteacher’s tone. Proper, faultless. “It’s his fault my child is on drugs. Was on drugs.”

  “Please tell that to your daughter. You’re here for her.”

  Mama put down her pocketbook. She slid closer to Lydia, pulling her hands away from the pillow. She told Lydia she was sure it was that boy’s fault. That Lydia was a good girl.

  Lydia wanted to take up for her husband, to say, he’d done the best he could. Like anybody. Like Lydia’s parents. He’d been planning to drive her back to the City when he’d been killed. But since Lydia had called her mother to say she needed help, there’d been nothing but hostility whenever Dante’s name had been spoken. There was no use trying to defend him. He was dead now, and she didn’t have the energy to debate her mother. Nobody ever could win with her.

  “Mama, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

  “Don’t you worry about that, baby,” her mother said. “I’m here now.”

  After a few more days, Belle came to retrieve her. They spent a month in Chicasetta. Then, Mama drove them in Lydia’s car, and on the way to the interstate, she stopped at a fruit stand, buying peaches and watermelons from a fat white man in bib overalls. As Mama busied herself with slapping the side of the melon, he watched her, spitting brown tobacco juice into a tin can. He was dour, until Mama exclaimed, “Oh! Brunswick stew! My mother never makes this anymore.” The man smiled a stained grin as she bought all five jars in the display.

  When her sisters had ridden with them in summers past, the trip had seemed shorter to Lydia. Even with stopping every two hours so she could take Ailey to a bathroom at a fast-food restaurant. On this journey, both the women in the car had stronger, larger bladders, and there was only one stop. After they used the facilities, they sat in the parking lot outside the restaurant and ate their fried chicken and cold biscuits. There was a quart of sweet tea for each of them, taken from the cooler in the back of the car.

  Lydia was apprehensive, thinking about her father. Would he be disappointed in her? Would he, too, disparage Dante? But at the house, after she hugged Ailey in the foyer—how tall her baby sister had grown—and laid her cheek against the wild curls that smelled like blue grease and a peaceful yesterday, Daddy had nothing but kindness for Lydia. His face relaxed, though he had put on so much weight. He hugged her closely, telling her she’d s
cared him. But she was home now. His girl was home.

  A few days later, Mama accompanied Lydia to the registrar’s office at Mecca University, standing beside her as she filled out the forms for the summer classes. Mama whispered, did she need to take that class over? Be honest, and Lydia whispered back, yes, she’d failed the entire fall semester. She had to take those over, and her mother told her, take only two classes. She didn’t want Lydia to overwhelm herself. The classes were half-full, the professors easygoing. They dressed casually and flipped past pages in the textbooks, declaring, six weeks wasn’t enough time to cover some of this material properly. So there’d be a multiple-choice test instead of a paper on those pages.

  Lydia received As in both classes and spent her free month sleeping in and making preserves with Mama in the kitchen, though there wasn’t the same pleasure in peeling fruit and vegetables as down in Chicasetta. After the jars were boiled and cooled, it was Lydia’s job to carry them down to the basement. She’d take a few moments to rest on the stairs, enjoying her brief solitude. Then she’d remember those mornings and early afternoon hours in the apartment that she shared with Dante. When she’d been free and a woman, not a child again in her parents’ house, though Mr. Rogers still had been her good friend. Lydia smiled, recalling how he talked to those puppets as if they were real people. Then Mama would call down to the basement. Was everything all right? She hadn’t fallen down the stairs, had she? And Lydia would climb back up.

  In August, she returned to classes at Mecca, taking up her same major, social work. In her classes, everyone talked about the readings, but they were too distant from the people they needed to help. They looked upon poor folks as if they were experiments. Lydia didn’t care about the case studies in her textbooks. She’d had real family living in the inner city of Atlanta: Dante’s mother and aunt. She’d lived with Dante on Campbellton Road. That hadn’t been in the projects, but it had been rough. The roaches bold until they’d swallowed enough boric acid. The people who’d lived in her apartment complex had real blood moving through their bodies. Not statistics. They drove old cars that always needed fixing, and they would knock on her apartment door, asking, was Dante in? Could they get a battery jump? Or, how much did he charge to look underneath the hood?