Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game

by Juliette Akinyi Ochieng

  “Human nature, such as it is, is pretty predictable. When one is told that one can’t have something, one always wants that thing. White women, having heard about the

  sexual prowess of black men, have lusted after them ever since. I should know,” she chuckled.

  Felice sat rapt.

  “For their part,” Laura continued, “black men have been told that the white man’s ‘prize,’ his woman, was strictly off limits, enforced under the threat of a brutal, humiliating death. If a prize is so wonderful, however, death might be a small price to pay for acquiring it. Probably many black men unconsciously think this way. Additionally, should a black man acquire his nemesis’ prize, it would serve his vengeance in a most effective way.

  “What the black man didn’t take into account was how his pursuit of the white woman would hurt the black woman. Having been told constantly that she is ugly--especially if she looks more African--is an affirmation of all her worst fears. This is especially true, when a black man chooses a white woman as a mate, or even as just a bed partner.”

  “Yes,” Felice whispered.

  “So, this all comes back to Daniel. I said that black men didn’t take into account the side effect of what they were doing, but that was in the past. These days, most black men do know how much it hurts black women when he is seen with a white woman. Either he doesn’t care, or he’s doing it specifically to hurt all black women, or one black woman in particular. Daniel did care.”

  “I knew he did it to hurt me, but I hadn’t thought it out quite that far,” Felice said. “I had been trying to avoid thinking about it.”

  “Understandable. I doubt if he thought it out so thoroughly, also.”

  Adrienne walked back out carrying a tray. It held three glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. She set it down on the table next to Felice.

  “Oh how ante-bellum of you, my darling daughter,” Laura said, grinning.

  Adrienne rolled her eyes as she sat back down.

  “Tired of the sermon yet?” Adrienne asked Felice.

  “Not at all.”

  “Adrienne finds this topic boring. She calls it ‘amateur race psychology.’”

  “Laura, don’t talk about me like I’m not here. I don’t think the topic is boring. It’s just that you’ve inundated me with it for years. I don’t feel the need to sit through the whole thing when you give ‘the lecture’ to somebody else. I brought Felice to hear it because I thought it might help.”

  “Am I being over sensitive?” Laura asked her daughter.

  “Yes, but that’s who you are--sensitive. Continue lecture.”

  Laura bowed to her daughter.

  “Thank you. Now where were we? Oh yes, Daniel. At the risk of sounding like I’m blaming the victim, I have to say this: you gave Daniel fear instead of love. You feared what Daniel would think about you if he had known the truth. Daniel found out that you didn’t trust him and he was hurt by it. He had to find out about your ‘reputation’ from the very men who had helped you to forge it--men he probably didn’t even like in the first place. It must have been quite humiliating for him, knowing what I do about the male ego.”

  Felice considered this. She hadn’t thought about Daniel’s feelings at all.

  Laura turned toward her canvas again. Felice looked at the portrait, which Laura appeared to be painting from memory.

  On first glance, the man appeared to be past sixty, but on further inspection, Felice could see that this was not so. He was a young white man, aged beyond his years. His gray eyes appeared to be old and young at the same time. His hands were gnarled, but not spotted. His back was

  straight.

  Felice marveled at Laura’s ability to capture this quality in a two-dimensional setting.

  “Maybe, in a few months or so, I’ll apologize to him,” Felice said, almost to herself.

  “That might be pushing it a bit. After all, you didn’t set out to hurt him, but he certainly set out to hurt you,” said Adrienne.

  “Maybe you should,” said Laura. “Not now, but sometime in the future, when he’s able to hear it. Hopefully, he’ll do the same, but don’t do it just for his forgiveness.”

  “No...I’d do it in order to...get some peace for myself, or something like it.”

  “Give the student another ‘A,’” said Laura quietly.

  Felice smiled.

  “I hope you’ll think about what I’ve said. All of it.”

  Laura paused for a beat.

  “What do you think of my work?”

  “It’s great.”

  “How so? And, no, I’m not fishing. I’d like an honest appraisal.”

  “Well, I’m not an expert on art or on anything else, for that matter.”

  “Yes, you are an art expert. We all are.

  “Either art touches something in us or we’re indifferent to it, which doesn’t necessarily make it bad, though sometimes it does,” she smirked.

  “I’m asking if it touches something in you.”

  Felice studied the canvas again. . “I like the way the man’s face looks: happy and sad at the same time--kind of like me.”

  “And like everyone else, though we don’t all realize it. High praise, indeed. Thank you, child.”

  Adrienne was silent. She recognized the painting as a replica of a photo of her own grandfather, a man she had never met.

  The next afternoon, Felice headed toward the gym. She had been searching for Adrienne all day, suspecting that her friend had been avoiding her. She had finally found her at the one place she knew Adrienne would probably be. In the off-season, about three times a week, the varsity basketball players regularly played pick-up games in the historically preserved old gym, which was the only athletic facility still located on the campus proper. The games were heated, fierce, and coed.

  She looked around at the spectators as she walked into the gym. Both the men’s and women’s teams had been nationally-ranked the previous season, so the pick-up games

  always drew a good-sized audience. To her dismay, but not unexpectedly, she spotted a number of the Taus immediately. They had spotted her as well and turned in her direction--actually pointing at her--smirking and laughing. Several of their female friends and sorority sisters, the Tau Lambda Pi, eyed her with scorn. She had been invited to pledge Tau Lambda at the beginning of her freshman year, but now none of the sorority sisters would be caught dead even talking to her. During a break in the action, even a couple of the male players eyed her with smirks on their faces.

  So she set herself down--alone at the end of one of the bleachers, trying to block out everything but the game.

  There was Adrienne, sure enough, getting back on defense.

  Each team was as evenly mixed gender-wise as possibly. On Adrienne’s team, there were two women and three men; on the other, the ratio was reversed. Felice grinned as she watched Adrienne, hair tied back, yank down a defensive rebound over a male player who was at least three inches taller. Adrienne, one of the few women who could palm a basketball, shot an outlet pass to Jerome Moore, the starting center of NMU’s men’s varsity team. Seven-feet tall, but surprisingly graceful, Jerome dribbled the ball for a few seconds. Then he pulled up for a baseline jumper. . The ball circled the rim and then bounced out. . But then who should get the rebound, but Adrienne? She had raced up court and was now underneath the opposing goal.

  Felice grinned as her friend yanked down yet another rebound and, after ducking under a defender, put up a baby hook shot. Swish! All net.

  Some of the Taus looked over at Felice in scorn, as they watched her jump up and cheer.

  “You go, girl!” she shouted.

  “Look at that. She doesn’t even have the decency to keep a low profile,” Kim Adams said to Vonetta Hall. “If I were her, I would have transferred to another school or dropped out.”

  Vonetta said nothing as Kim went on ripping into Felice. Vonetta had once thought of Felice as her little sister, but when she found out what Felice had done, she had to r
estrain herself from strangling her.

  Now, she wasn’t sure how she felt about her. Calvin had come back to her, professing his love, and begging her forgiveness, and after a time, she had let him back into her life.

  She looked over at Felice. Felice had hurt and betrayed her, and for a little while after that, Vonetta had been so bitter and cynical, she had wondered if it were possible to trust anyone again. But now, she and Calvin were back together, and her life pretty much continued on the same course as before.

  Vonetta was happy that she had been mature enough not to have exacted some kind of revenge on Felice. She thought back to when she had been a sixteen-year-old gang member in Chicago. Had something like this happened then, Vonetta would have gotten her girls together and they would have made Felice wish she had never been born. But, that was another life.

  Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord and, boy, wasn’t that right? She had known about Felice’s other escapades and had warned her to be careful. But, Felice hadn’t listened and had paid the price.

  Now Felice sat alone, vilified, and shunned by nearly every black person on campus. Vonetta had tried hard to feel happy that Felice had gotten her comeuppance, but, somehow, could not.

  “Why doesn’t that ho just sit down?” Kim’s contemptuous voice sounded in her ears.

  “Can we talk about something else? The last person I want to talk about is Felice LeCroix.”

  “Oh, sorry, girl. I understand. You must really hate her.”

  Vonetta silently looked over at her former friend again, feeling nothing in her heart but pity.

  “Oh, that’s the one. I might have to get me some of that,” said the new Tau Sigma pledge, Kwame Lewis, to his ‘big brother,’ Andre Carter. “Kinda skinny, but look at that ass!”

  “Yeah, she likes us Taus, but ‘big brothers’ have first dibs,” grinned Andre. “Besides, a hoochie like that might shoot you down. Trevor and them said they all used condoms, but who knows who else has been there? She might have HIV, THC, and M-O-U-S-E, for all anybody knows.” They both laughed.

  “Who’s she cheering for?”

  “That nappy-headed, yellow bitch, Adrienne Anderson,” sneered Andre, pointing at the court, his pride still smarting from their encounter.

  “That’s the skank who yaps on and on about the Greeks. Those two are real tight. Hey, maybe they’ve turned into labia-lappers!”

  “Could be. When I was in high school, the girls’ entire basketball team was dykes.”

  Andre’s mind churned with malice, an idea for the perfect revenge forming in his mind. So Felice thought she was too good for him, did she? So she thought he was an asshole, did she? So that big, half-white bitch Adrienne was going to beat him down, was she? Well, let’s see how they both liked the latest about them. They thought they were so smart. He’d make their lives so miserable that they’d never want to set foot on this campus again.

  “So, how come you didn’t tell your mom about Kevin? You seemed to have told her everything else about me,” said Felice looking at Adrienne, unable to decide if she were angry or not.

  They sat on the bleachers as the gym emptied out. Adrienne’s team had won this round, with Adrienne scoring fifteen points and yanking down ten rebounds. Several of the players on each team slapped her high-five and on the shoulders as they walked by.

  “Good game,” they all said, eyeing Felice curiously.

  Adrienne looked at her sheepishly, toweling the sweat from her forehead.

  “I’m sorry. But I knew Mom could help. Believe me; I haven’t breathed a word to anyone else. ”

  “Well, it’s not like everyone else doesn’t know almost everything already,” Felice sighed. “But you must have been feeling guilty, since you’ve been hiding from me all day. Made me have to come up in here and deal with almost every Negro on campus looking at me like I have leprosy. ”

  “Sorry.”

  Felice thought for a minute.

  “Actually, there’s something fun about being a social outcast. Everybody leaves you alone.” Felice grinned. “And gets upset when you’re happy. When you tossed up that hook, I jumped up and cheered.”

  “Yeah, I heard your big mouth.”

  “When I sat back down, I noticed that some of ‘em were looking at me like I lost my mind.”

  “What did Laura say? Something about happiness being the best revenge?”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it? You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Why didn’t I tell her about Kevin? Laura can’t stand most white men. She would have been more against it than I am. Remember what I told you the other day about white men? Where do you think I got all that propaganda from?” she giggled.

  “Too weird: a white woman, with a half-black daughter, being against me dating a white man.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So, you still think it’s not a good idea?”

  “Yes. No. Heck, I don’t know.”

  “I saw him on Saturday.”

  “What?”

  “I accidentally ran into him in the mall when I was looking for a birthday present for my dad.”

  Felice told her the whole story.

  “Wow! Already had that first date. So what do you think? Anything happening?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Have you seen him today?”

  “No. Maybe he’s hiding from me, too.”

  “From what you told me, I doubt it. Why didn’t you give him your phone number?”

  “Do you know what my dad told me when I was about fifteen? He said that I better not ever embarrass him by

  having a white man coming to his door asking for his daughter.”

  “Uh-oh! So, you gonna see him on the sly?”

  “That would be a definite ‘no.’ I’ve had enough of hiding things from my folks and from everybody else. It takes too much energy to lie.”

  “So, you gonna to give him the brush-off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Adrienne looked at her. “Please! You know you’re going to go for it and why not? Don’t you think you’ve had a crappy enough time around this joint already? Whatever mistakes you’ve made, you’ve paid for them. It’s time for you to have some fun and to hell with what Laura, your dad, and especially these idiots around here think. Go out with him again. If somebody around here doesn’t like it, tell ‘em to kiss your ass!”

  “A little steamed, aren’t we? Since you know so much, tell me what to do about my dad.”

  “Does your mom feel the same way?”

  “I’m not sure, but I kind of don’t think so. She’s always been much more tolerant than Dad.”

  “She might be on your side.”

  “I’d hate to put them in that position.”

  “Well, girl, then you have to decide whether it’s worth it or not. Look, I’ve got to get a shower.”

  Felice waved her hand in front of her face and frowned. “I thought something was kickin’.”

  “Keep on, hear? I’ll call you later.”

  Tale of the Tigers

  Chapter Four

  “The Supreme Court makes most of its decisions based on stare decisis. That is to say, it makes its decisions following those principles of law that have been established in similar cases that have been decided earlier.”

  Mr. Weinberg, Felice’s political science professor, had a habit of speaking in long, run-on sentences. This posed a problem for some students, but she wasn’t one of them. She had the useful ability to pick out pertinent information from whatever topic any professor lectured. She found the workings of the Supreme Court particularly fascinating; its schedule, its procedures, its history. She, for one, had no

  idea (until now), that the court based all of its decisions solely on a case’s compatibility with the U.S. Constitution. How odd, she now thought, to be born and grow up in a country with a two hundred year-old Constitution and barely know anything about it.

  “However, on occasion, the court will rule agains
t stare decisis if it deems that a prior court’s decision in the pertinent case was misinterpreted, i.e., wrong, and/or in conflict with the content or the spirit of the Constitution. Such was the case in Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1955. The decision in this case struck down that of a prior court’s case, Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896. We’ll discuss the two cases on Friday. See you then.”

  The subject of government had not been one of Felice’s strong suits in high school, mostly due to her overall boredom with school, rather than lack of aptitude. But now, after taking one of the general education requirements for graduation--Political Science--she found herself enthralled. Her professor was a middle-aged man who had a reputation for being a taskmaster. When she had told another student who her instructor was, he had advised her to take one of the other political science classes, one with an easier teacher.

  The advice had intrigued her: a challenge? So she had stayed in the class and, so far, she was happy she did. Most of the instructions up to that point leaned heavily on the content and workings of the Constitution. It was such a short, simple document, but with so much meaning. All the duties of each branch of the government laid out in perfect clarity, with no branch having precedence over the other and each having power to keep the other two in check. It wasn’t a perfect document and its framers knew it could never possibly be, so they gave future lawmakers the power to change it with the ever-changing spirit of the times. Felice was fascinated.

  The articles and amendments of the Constitution began to swirl through Felice’s head as she gathered her belongings. Mr. Weinberg had required that each student read the Constitution--which was in the front of the textbook--in its entirety at least once a week, and Felice, for the most part, complied. One particular part of the first article stayed with her: the passage on taxation and representation: