Sarah was nothing like the girls I had known at Miss Harding’s Preparatory School. She was interested in politics and equal rights and men like John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Norman Mailer. I’m not sure whether she wanted to make out with them, practice writing their names, or dream of their wedding day, but she loved them all the same. In fact, sometimes I wondered if Sarah really liked boys at all.
“Bezellia, have you ever done it? I mean sex. Have you ever had sex?” she asked me late one night while we were lying in our beds, our faces hidden in the room’s darkness. I told her that I had. Once.
“Did you like it?” Sarah seemed uncomfortable with her questions and asked them slowly, as if the pace eased her apprehension.
“Yes and no. It wasn’t what I expected entirely. I mean it was a little uncomfortable at first, but then again I don’t really have anything to compare it to. The best part was just being that close to someone. I guess you just can’t get any closer than that. I’m hoping the sheer pleasure of it comes with more practice. At least that’s what my cousin Cornelia says will happen. She’s had a steady boyfriend for a year now and has had sex lots of times. She even takes those birth control pills.”
I could hear Sarah breathing as if her body was slowly absorbing everything I had told her.
“I guess I don’t know if I want it that much,” she said at last. “I mean the practicing and all … for what really?”
“Maybe you’ve just got your mind on other things, bigger things, more important things,” I reassured her. “Maybe later it will seem worth it. When you’re ready.”
“Maybe.”
And that was all we ever said about boys, both preferring to keep our fantasies and our realities to ourselves. But I faithfully signed her petitions, mailed her letters to Washington, and posted her flyers from one end of campus to the other. We were, Sarah said, merely foot soldiers, sisters on the battlefield, in this fight for equality, and Gloria Steinem was our long-haired, braless leader, forging our path to liberation. Sometimes I think I did what Sarah wanted as much for Samuel as I did for myself … and my sisters on the battlefield. And although some days I felt like I was trapped in the middle of a never-ending political protest, I have to admit that I learned more from this girl from Troutville, Virginia, than I did from any of my professors who were determined to teach me the differences between Rousseau and Voltaire and Hemingway and Faulkner.
One cool, breezy evening in October, Sarah asked me to go to a lecture across campus. I begged her to let me stay in our room and study for a French test, but she said French was inconsequential to a woman who couldn’t even claim dominion over her own body. Gloria Steinem had come to Hollins, and she had brought a friend. And Sarah was, of course, determined to stake out a seat on the front row. “Quel dommage,” I whispered to myself and obediently followed my roommate to the chapel.
Gloria Steinem was already there, talking to young girls eager to say something smart and impressive. Sarah had taped so many pictures of her over her bed that she almost seemed like an old friend to me by now. Standing next to Ms. Steinem was a woman I didn’t recognize, a beautiful black woman with a large Afro that perfectly framed her face. Her smile was kind and accepting—even if she was surrounded by a hundred white girls chanting for change and wearing little Bobbie Brooks blouses and coordinating pleated skirts.
Back home, I knew a lot of black women. But they were all like Maizelle, maids who worked long hours for white families or who were neatly hidden in the kitchen at the country club or who came to our church on Sundays to tend to the white babies while their mothers worshipped in the sanctuary.
I remember when I was a little girl shopping downtown with my mother and we approached a black woman and her two little girls on the sidewalk. This mother, nicely dressed in a wool skirt and silk blouse, obediently moved out of the way, pulling her two daughters along with her and allowing my mother and me to pass without missing a step. I’ll never forget the expression on her face, the weary look of frustration and humiliation as she turned her head, certain not to stare at the white woman and her little girl. But this Dorothy Pitman stared right at me as I took my seat on the front row.
She had come to Hollins, she said, looking for a true humanist, for the young woman who understood that racism and sexism are inexplicably bound. She smiled and then clapped her hands to further punctuate her point, and the crowd let out a thunderous roar, as if they already knew this to be so.
“And black southern women, my friends, suffer the most,” she said and struck her hand against the wooden podium. That was it. Nine simple words. And I knew Maizelle was that black southern woman she was talking about. She had lived in that dark, cold basement for years. She had watched the crows gobble up her pound cake. She had listened to my mother call her useless and lazy. And in that moment, I felt sad, a sadness that was so deep I couldn’t tell where it stopped or started.
Sarah and I walked back to the dorm in silence. I knew I had a confession to make, a declaration of sorts. I suddenly needed to tell her about the one woman who had genuinely cared for me since the day I was born but had been forced to sleep in a cold, dark basement. I needed to tell her about the woman who had loved me like a daughter—fed me, bathed me, dressed me, listened to my stories—but would never be called Mother. I needed to tell her about Maizelle, but nothing came out of my mouth. We walked on in silence, my shame and guilt making every step difficult and sluggish.
A few weeks later, a letter came from my mother. I started reading it aloud, wanting to share with Sarah something about my life back in Nashville. But as I began to grasp the meaning of every word, I fell quiet. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t cry. I think I was shocked into silence as Maizelle would say. Sarah demanded to know what was wrong, and I simply pushed the crumpled letter into the palm of her hand. She began reading it out loud, and then she, too, grew silent. The letter fell to the floor, but Samuel would soon be on his way to boot camp.
He shouldn’t be going, I cried, looking to Sarah for some sort of explanation. He didn’t have to go. He was going to college. He was going to law school after that. The war he needed to fight was right here, not on the other side of the world. He had said so himself a hundred times. There had to be a mistake. College boys didn’t go to Vietnam, not even the black ones. Sarah held me in her arms, never once trying to convince me that everything was going to be just fine.
But Mother said there was no mistake. She said that Samuel never showed up at Morehouse. Instead he had driven over to Mississippi to listen to some civil rights activist who preached on and on about the young black man’s duty to fight injustice at any cost. And even though she figured all this fighting talk must certainly have influenced Samuel’s decision not to go back to school, she thinks that, in the end, it had more to do with events that occurred after he left the state of Mississippi.
Somewhere west of Tuscaloosa, an Alabama sheriff stopped Samuel for speeding. He and his two friends were pulled out of the car and forced to strip down to their underwear. Nathaniel wouldn’t say what all happened after that, but his son came back to Tennessee a changed man. He said he was angry. He said he was desperate. He said he started rambling on and on about his moral obligation to defend his brothers whose voices were never heard. Nathaniel said he wasn’t making much sense, but he never thought his son would go looking for a fight.
Apparently Samuel came home just long enough to pack his bags and tell his mama and daddy good-bye and then caught a bus to New York City. He said his voice was going to be heard and that wasn’t going to happen as long as he wasted his time marching with a preacher singing songs and promising a better day. But Uncle Sam figured out that Samuel Stephenson was no longer a student and sent him a letter, personally inviting him to come and participate in the conflict in Vietnam. Nathaniel said if his son was looking for a good fight, then, sadly, he had found one.
I had watched the evening news. I had seen boys my own age, who should ha
ve been playing baseball and making out with their girlfriends in the backseats of their daddies’ cars, lying dead in a rice paddy. I had seen babies and their mothers with warm brown skin and almond-shaped eyes huddled together—crying, wounded, hungry.
When my father died, I knew that people expected to find me huddled in a corner, somber and red-eyed. I could see the surprise on their faces when I wasn’t. But now I couldn’t stop crying. Only this time, I knew no one would understand the brokenness I was feeling. The handsome men and women who had put on their well-tailored black suits and had carried casseroles to my front door would not want to see these tears. So I climbed to the top of Tinker Mountain and screamed Samuel’s name for the entire world to hear. I screamed until I had no voice, and I cried until I had no strength. Then I stumbled back down the mountain not knowing whether Samuel Stephenson would be alive at the end of the day or not.
At first, I found it hard to concentrate, thinking any minute I would get another letter or maybe even a telegram, this time tersely informing me that Samuel had been killed. And without even needing to ask, Maizelle sent me his address, a secret the two of us kept to ourselves. I wrote to Samuel, reminding him to be careful, to come home alive, but I never heard anything back. And as the days fell into months, I became more confident, or maybe foolish, in thinking that my friend, wherever he was, would find his way back to Tennessee.
And while I waited, I pretended that life was normal. And peacefully tucked there against Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, I found it was easy to think that it was. I went to class and listened as one professor lectured about Jefferson’s influence on the Declaration of Independence and another about the Pythagorean influence on Platonic philosophy. And somewhere along the way, I always found an opportunity to voice my opposition to the war, whether it was relevant to class discussion or not. I could see my classmates roll their eyes at my persistent protest, but I didn’t care. Maybe they knew I was thinking only of Samuel, and not the thousands of other boys fighting in Vietnam. But I really didn’t care.
I wrote for the school newspaper and even joined a new yoga club on campus, although I didn’t dare tell Mother. She would insist that this yoga was surely some kind of devil worship for no other reason than what she had read about the Maharishi in some magazine, and would probably send Reverend Foster to bring me home straightaway now that I had learned to bend and stretch my body into awkward and unladylike poses.
I was, however, asked to join the Cotillion Club, something that I knew would please my mother immensely but that surprised me even more than Sarah, particularly given my new, more enlightened state of being. Apparently a girl’s last name was still considered by some at Hollins to be one of her most important assets. And apparently my last name was still considered to be of value, although Sarah said she would be forced to find another roommate if I joined a group of girls who did nothing more than plan dances and other frivolous social outings so that we could parade ourselves in front of a bunch of salivating young men with absolutely no interest in our intellect. I told Sarah that my mother actually considered dancing to be one of life’s most important talents. She rolled her eyes as if to say that I had proven her point.
Mother wrote me almost every day. She missed me terribly, she said, but knew the Lord would comfort her lonely heart. And as much as she missed me, she said Adelaide missed me even more. I wrote Mother back and suggested that my little sister come for a visit, that maybe a change of scenery would do her some good. Mother replied, offering no specific explanation, only to say that Adelaide was not able to travel at this time. I used the pay phone in the hallway outside my room and made a collect call to Uncle Thad. I needed him to tell me truthfully how everyone was doing at Grove Hill. He hesitated for a moment. And I told him if he didn’t speak up soon, I was hanging up the phone and jumping on the next bus home.
He paused again and stuttered a bit but finally admitted that everyone was doing much better now, although it had been quite a difficult few weeks. He said Mother had been taking Adelaide to church on a regular basis for several months now, convinced that a perfect attendance record would somehow cure Adelaide of any of her peculiarities. But Adelaide finally told Mother she had had enough of her religion and neither she nor Reverend Foster, or even God himself, understood the pounding pain inside her head. This time Mother believed her, so she threw her in the Cadillac and took her back down to Atlanta. The doctors said Adelaide was merely screaming for attention, but they would be more than happy to admit her to a psychiatric hospital for therapeutic rehabilitation. Mother didn’t care for their diagnosis much, so she brought her daughter, along with another very large bottle of pills, back home.
As soon as they returned to Grove Hill, Mother moved Maizelle upstairs, thinking it was better to have two sets of ears listening for her baby girl. Then she asked Maizelle if she still knew how to reach that voodoo witch on the other side of the river, the one who had been born and raised in New Orleans. I guess Mother was thinking that this was going to require the skill and expertise of someone more in touch with the underworld than her precious Reverend Foster.
Besides, she probably preferred he know nothing about this, even if she had convinced herself that it wouldn’t really be contrary to any biblical teachings she knew if all you were wanting to do was rid your child of an evil spirit. Even Jesus had been known to do an exorcism or two. But she grew so nervous about this woman coming to her house, especially after the sky turned cloudy and dark, that she telephoned Uncle Thad at the very last minute and begged him to run over just in case they needed some masculine and, of course, discreet protection.
By the time he got to Grove Hill, not long before midnight, the cleansing ritual, as Mother preferred to call it, had already begun. Uncle Thad said the woman did in fact look like some kind of voodoo witch he had seen down in New Orleans. She was dressed in a ratty old cotton dress with a bright orange cotton cloth wrapped around her head and was comfortably settled on the living room sofa, right next to Adelaide, chanting some kind of nonsense and burning homemade candles that smelled like rotten eggs.
She kept a muslin bag filled with roots and herbs tied to her waist and told Mother to boil some water on the stove. Then she placed her hands on Adelaide’s head and chanted and sang for more than an hour, filling the room with words that none of them understood. She gave Adelaide a bitter tea to drink. My little sister took one sip and promptly fell asleep. Mother screamed out loud, thinking she had gone and hired a witch to kill her baby girl.
The woman told her to hush and promised that Adelaide had been finally freed from the evil that had kept such a strong hold on her. She told Mother to put her to bed and keep a cool cloth on her head during the night. When Adelaide finally opened her eyes, a day and a half later, she said her head wasn’t hurting anymore.
Adelaide did seem better, but Mother just kept trying to fix her, trying to turn her into something she was never meant to be. Maybe Mother felt guilty, or maybe she felt embarrassed by her slightly awkward daughter. But either way, she never gave up trying to make Adelaide into a girl she was more comfortable knowing.
Mother continued to write. She said nothing about Samuel, only that Adelaide was always asking for me, even crying out for me in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure if that was the truth or if Mother needed me at home so desperately she was willing to say anything to get me there. She and Adelaide had certainly convinced themselves that life at Grove Hill would be better only if I was there. And by May, I found myself dreading the thought of going back home, where I would certainly be suffocated by their constant attention.
So instead of packing my trunk like the others girls excited about leaving for the summer, I found myself lying about needing to stay at Hollins. A visiting English professor, I said, had come all the way from Boston and selected me as his assistant. It was an honor, an opportunity I just couldn’t forgo. He said my writing had promise. And if she would let me stay, I would even register for two additi
onal classes so that I might be able to graduate a full semester early. Mother wrote me a brief letter and said she hoped this was indeed a once in a lifetime opportunity. She and Adelaide would both be looking for me at the end of July.
Only a few hundred of us stayed behind for summer study; even Sarah went home. She said she was going to organize a local chapter of the National Organization for Women in Troutville. Well, she was going to try. And, to be honest, I was glad she would be gone for at least a few weeks so I could finally think about something other than equal rights and congressional legislation. Instead I took an English class and wrote a short story about a wealthy family with an alcoholic mother and a doctor father who mysteriously died in his own home while everyone was sleeping. My professor thought it was brilliant, a rich and dark insight into the privileged American family. He gave me an A, said I should continue writing, and then asked if I’d like to join him for a cup of coffee.
Mitchell Franklin was more of a graduate student from Boston University than a full-fledged professor. He was finishing his doctorate degree in American folk literature and was spending the summer researching and teaching at Hollins. Before long, we were having coffee together every morning. And not long after that, we were meeting in his tiny apartment on the edge of campus every afternoon. He would open a bottle of wine and pour me a glass as if I was comfortable drinking the alcohol that made me feel both warm and slightly confused. We listened to Led Zeppelin and made out on the couch. And when our bodies started feeling relaxed and our heads slightly numb, Mitchell would take my hand and lead me to his bed.
Susan Gregg Gilmore Page 15