Woodridge, quite undeniably, was homosexual, and during the course of his tenure, some students struggling with their sexuality did visit. He did not have any sexual interest in his pupils, however, and for their part, they were merely seeking answers to questions they were unable to ask in their heteronormed home lives. Yet most of the knocks on Woodridge’s door were not from students suffering from a displacement of heterosexual desire; rather, they came from those suffering an intellectual displacement that did not successfully integrate with the institute’s policies. Lee Roy had lost a friend, and there were protests by students, yet the institute kept its pace. Classes remained in session. The chaplain lectured on Black student morality, and Sammy stayed dead. His fist grazed the wooden surface and he waited.
Woodridge was not surprised when he opened the door. He had pegged this one. “Well, if it isn’t the little tire-iron man.” He frowned. “I’m still working with that one. It lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.” He gave names to all his special visitors, his outliers. The institute’s most prolific young thinkers and writers, yet their true character lay hidden beneath the mask they insisted on wearing even in a racially homogenized space. These were his invisible men, frightened of their own selves. They mistakenly came to him seeking cosmetic fixes for their intellectual marginalization. They came to him wanting to learn how to hide more effectively. And one by one, he crushed their spirits while simultaneously setting them free.
They sat across from one another, Lee Roy in an upright winged-back chair and Woodridge on the chaise longue, eying him curiously. “I can offer you coffee, tea, or water.”
Lee Roy wordlessly pulled a mason jar from his jacket pocket—bad moonshine—to which Woodridge commented, “And the advice that a gentleman carries a flask, not a jar.” He wrinkled his nose. “And not of that Shorter swill, but you didn’t visit for alcohol connoisseurship.”
Lee Roy took a large gulp from the mason jar. “No, sir—I mean, Professor—I did not.”
“Well . . . enlighten me. Why are you here?”
Lee Roy took a smaller sip. “I don’t know where else to be.”
“I see.” Woodridge rose and poured a scotch from a glass decanter. “You know, you remind me of someone. He came to me late at night—as they all do—so full of despair. As much nightly despair as the daytime disdain that they have for me. I know you all pass by my door, snickering and pointing. I’m too . . . what is it you call it now? Fruity?”
“I imagine that’s between you and your God, Professor.”
Woodridge exploded in laughter. It was hearty and throaty and unexpected from the same body that could produce a soprano version of “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” He drank his scotch in one long progressive swallow. “Well, that is something. Because, between you and me,”—he winked conspiratorially—“you don’t believe in God.”
Lee Roy’s hand was large and awkward on the mason jar. He looked at the decanter of scotch. “Can I have . . .”
“No. You cannot.”
Lee Roy swished the moonshine around the jar. “A glass then?” Woodridge rose and disappeared behind a shimmer of satin curtains separating the kitchen area. Lee Roy sat in a haze. He hadn’t processed it. God was something you took for granted and accepted as a condition. God was like Blackness. You might not agree with the ideal, but everyone else did, so you struggled along with it and its complications even though God seemed to be discriminatory in his blessings. You believed in God because of the miracles he had given others. You believe in their God, for them.
Woodridge returned with a hefty crystal glass and set it on the end table next to Lee Roy. He relieved Lee Roy of the jar so effortlessly that Lee Roy hadn’t registered it until his drink was made. Returning to his chair, Woodridge carefully plucked an egg from his bookcase shelf, cupped it gently, and snorted. “Let me tell you about God. You come here in your darkest moments, and you reach for someone else you imagine is in darkness—me, because of who I am. In the dark, it never occurs to any of you that what you crave most is light. Enlightenment. I appear as such with just a flick of the switch. You speak of God and miracles but would never regard me as such. And yet, who do you reach for in your darkest hours? Whose name do you invoke? For your God . . . you knock on my door.” His eyes remained trained on the egg, which he delicately turned in his hand.
“What is that?” Lee Roy’s eyes were also fixed on the egg.
“Exactly!”
“No,” Lee Roy specified. “I mean, that in your hand.”
Woodridge held the egg toward Lee Roy in his open palm. “It’s you.”
Lee Roy gently retrieved it. “It’s an egg?”
“It’s a beginning,” Woodridge emphasized. “At least symbolically. In reality, that,” he pointed to the egg, “is a barbaric travesty. Do you know ornithology?”
Lee Roy shook his head slowly and felt the moonshine’s countercurrent movement.
“Ornithology is the study of birds.” Woodridge had been fascinated with them since his youth. Their majesty and freedom and gaiety proved to him that if those qualities were possible in birds, under the dominion of humans, then surely he could manage a modicum of the same traits.
“You know, you can’t profess to love birds,” Woodridge continued, “and murder them for your own collection. And puncture their eggs and drain out the embryos because you love them so much. That egg is a reminder of a dark time in my life when I was willing to kill the qualities that I most admire.”
Lee Roy rotated the egg and spied the tiny puncture wound in its fragile shell. “What kind of bird was it?”
Woodridge dragged on his pipe. “A mockingbird.”
Lee Roy reached out to return the egg, but Woodridge held up his hand. “I want you to keep it. I don’t need it any longer. I have much to remind me of the past.”
The mockingbird egg saw Lee Roy matriculate in title and name. He buried the Lee and Roy parts of himself alongside the helplessness that he felt about Sammy. He became good at burying things over which he felt little control. The push and pull of integration, the gap between his studies and the real-world application of them, and the realization that there was absolutely no difference between the inner workings of his fraternity and those of the Blackstone Rangers. LeRoi greeted the new decade and its integration of Blackness into a system ready to acknowledge its legal equality if not quite a social one. The framed depictions of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, and John Shaft that adorned his dormitory wall loomed imposingly over a small shelf on which the tiny egg rested.
Six
the new black
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched
into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
—Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s”
Eve and Nelle sat with eyes glued to the screen, focused on the breakout star of The Big Doll House. Busty and brown, Pam Grier portrayed a prostitute in the women-in-prison flick. When she ordered her heroin-addicted lover to trade bunks with the new girl, stating, “I like to be on top,” Eve’s eyes shifted toward Nelle. The flickering light of the film highlighted her friend in a mix of colors. Eve wondered who played the dominant role of man in Nelle’s relationships. She would never bring herself to ask and chided herself for the thought, which felt disturbingly impure.
Nelle refused to acknowledge Eve’s stare. She frowned as Grier’s character offered to exchange sex for drugs with a male food-delivery worker. When he tells her, “Forget it, Helen. I know you dig girls,” Nelle snorted loudly as Grier replied, “I’m not this way because I want to be. It’s this place. Pretty soon a girl gets strong desires. And it creeps up on you like a disease. But it’s curable.”
Nelle rolled her eyes and sighed. “I can guess the cure . . .”
“Shhh,” Eve hissed.
On-screen, Grier disclosed the cure. “A real man.
Like you.” She reached through the bars of her cell and grabbed the worker’s hand directing it downward, off-camera, toward her genitals.
“This is ridiculous,” Nelle whispered only to get hushed again by Eve, who was finding it quite informative. It wasn’t prison but college that brought out Nelle’s same-sex appreciation. Eve may have been obsessed with the physical aspects of homosexuality, but Nelle hardly gave thought to the sexual acts—at least not at first. She hadn’t spotted a beautiful fellow undergrad across Tuskegee’s campus. She hadn’t been seduced by an older female professor. She hadn’t been abused by male suitors. Nelle had simply grown bored with male companionship and found herself preferring the company of women. Her desire did not emerge from the parted legs of a female lover, rather it unraveled itself between the pages penned by Black feminist writers. It stirred her in ways she couldn’t quite communicate to Eve, although she tried. She gave her friend Nella Larsen’s Passing, but void of overt same-sex desire, Eve—still focused on the sexual nature of her friend—failed to read anything more than the surface narrative.
What Eve did understand was what The Big Doll House would later illustrate: homosexuality as a direct result of white influence or isolation from men. Watching the shower scene, by this time a requisite feature of the women-in-prison genre, reminded Eve of Tuskegee. Eve thought back to the large dorm showers and her earlier aversion to sharing the space with Nelle. She felt as uneasy in the crowded movie theater as she did years earlier in the shared dorm room.
Eve couldn’t reconcile Nelle’s sexuality within the context of Blackness, the only conclusion that could be drawn was that Nelle was inauthentic. Eve saw her best friend become compromised in the ways of white folks. Somehow her best friend had become a bulldagger right under Eve’s watchful eye as her dormitory roommate. At a historically Black college. In a predominantly Black city. Afro and all.
Yet it was not white power, nor the man, nor the government that overthrew that bastion of Black beauty and power. Afros were halos of Black pride. The manifestation of Black Is Beautiful. They were a declaration and refused to be demure. The bigger, the better. Still, afros were hot. Hot as in cool, as in good. But also hot as in sweat trickling down the sides of faces and backs of necks. Hot. The afro would meet its final demise in the eighties.
But Nelle and Eve were a decade away from the drippy coolness of the curl. And Nelle’s impressively large afro was especially hot in their shared dorm room at Tuskegee. Eve may have ceased to be physically comfortable in the space since Nelle’s disclosure, but Nelle remained true to herself, which included continuing to lounge in their room in her underwear when the temperature was particularly high. Eve used to join her, similarly clad, they would throw ice on each other from across the room. They had comfortably dressed and undressed in each other’s presence since they were young. But the disclosure brought a close to such intimacies. Eve often dressed immediately after showering in the shared dormitory bathroom on their floor, ironically in full view of anyone who happened to be in the bathroom at the same time.
Eve had told her friend, “What you do disgusts me,” without any actual knowledge of what Nelle did. In fact, at the time, Nelle had not done anything outside of reading a few books. She was still sleeping with the Alpha fraternity pledge. Her lesbianism, in its preliminary, theoretical stage, did not preclude sex with men. This did not go unnoticed by Eve, who silently turned her nose up at her friend when Nelle left on her dates with him. To Eve, the only thing worse than a lesbian was a confused one who continued to sleep with men.
“What about Paul?” Eve asked one afternoon as they walked from White Hall to the student cafeteria.
Nelle looked perplexed. “Who the hell is Paul?”
Eve nodded in the direction of a collection of men in black suits and sunglasses. “The ‘almost Alpha.’ Your boyfriend that keeps lurking around. Don’t you see him always just happening to be where you are?”
Nelle shrugged.
“That’s all you got is a shrug?” Eve frowned. “First of all,” she glared at the fraternity, “anybody willing to join a damn cult—”
“Fraternities aren’t cults,” Nelle interjected.
“They dress alike and do whatever their leaders tell them,” Eve countered.
“Fair enough,” Nelle responded. “Your point?”
“My point,” Eve stressed, “is that looks like some real fragile-ego shit and you’d better watch out for that.”
Nelle shrugged again and opened the door to the cafeteria. “His name’s Richard, by the way. So you know who to report when I get kidnapped.”
Their debate continued sometimes for days on end, other times pausing for the occasional truce. Through it all, Nelle took heed of Eve’s advice and distanced herself from Richard, whose recently increasing presence Nelle had felt so steadily that she became startled by its absence. She shared the observation with Eve as they sat on their respective beds.
“You gonna have to choose a side of the fence. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to be your friend if you choose the wrong one.”
Nelle glanced across their dorm room at Eve. “This fence. Who exactly built it?”
“What?” Eve frowned.
Nelle shook her head. “Never mind.” Then added, “So, you’d throw away a lifetime friendship because of who I may or may not date.”
“I’d say the same to you. You’d prioritize this, this—” Eve stammered for a definition. “—this urge of yours over our friendship. Hell, over your salvation?”
“Salvation!” Nelle chortled. “You all of a sudden saved when it comes to my sex life? What about your own, Eve?”
Eve balked as Nelle continued. “We came down here to find ourselves. You to connect with your history, and I came down here to find myself too, Eve. Or did you just think that my own studies and focus would be about your shit as well?”
“I thought we’d still be—”
“Friends?” Nelle crossed the room to Eve. “Of course we’ll—”
“Normal,” Eve spat, stopping Nelle in her tracks. “I thought we’d still be normal down here.”
Ironically, it was Eve’s condemnation of Nelle that became the catalyst for Nelle’s first sexual experience with a woman. As Nelle listened to Eve’s disdain and disbelief that she could want to touch a woman, she actually became interested in doing so.
“You don’t even know what you’re talking about!” Nelle shot back. “Just because it’s something different . . .”
“I mean, what do two women even do?” Eve sneered.
“I assume that’s rhetorical.” Nelle fanned her afro with a paper fan advertising services at a local church. She had no idea how it had come into their possession. Sometimes things just appeared as a result of communal dormitory living.
Eve recoiled, “I don’t wanna know what you do.” But she did want to know. It was a conundrum: wanting to know but realizing that those merely curious of such knowledge were just as damned as those who lived it. Eve didn’t understand her anger but felt it nonetheless. She felt betrayed, as if Nelle had purposefully kept a part of herself from her. In Eve’s mind it was this imagined betrayal, and not some antigay hostility, that allowed her to coddle a bitterness unperturbed by Nelle’s exit punctuated by the slamming of the dorm room door.
Nelle, having no experiential knowledge, began to wonder herself what took place between two intimate female partners. She wasn’t naive. Neither was Eve, for the matter. They both had assumptions based on their individual sexual experiences. Yet Eve’s stomach turned as she tried to purge the thoughts from her mind, while Nelle’s fluttered as her mind opened to embrace them. She couldn’t talk to her best friend about what best girlfriends usually discussed, heartthrobs and heartaches. Nelle’s heart palpitated between desire and a longing for an unknown home.
It was night when she knocked on Woodridge’s door some three years
after Lee Roy’s visit. His hair contained more gray, and the goatee had been grown into a full, closely trimmed beard. He wore a satin smoking jacket and silk scarf tucked into the shirt beneath it. The visit both surprised and amused Woodridge. He stood with his hand still on the doorknob and appraised Nelle. “Well, this is most unusual.”
Never had one of his student conversations been so straightforward. Nelle sat in the proffered chair. “I like women.” The declaration was as far as she had managed to go into any exploration. Men had been easier to a certain extent. They sniffed around women so early that girls learned to fend them off before processing their own desires. Now as she sat in Woodridge’s living area, she felt she needed a guide, and Woodridge presented a most apt Charon into this underworld.
“My word. You are direct, aren’t you?” Woodridge smiled. “Times appear to change slowly regarding the Negro, but I dare say, some things might be too rapid for their own good.”
“You mean Black homosexuality?”
“We’ve had the desire to live as racial equals. We have marched. We have petitioned. We have died. But no one is going to gather for your rights as a sexual equal to love whomever you choose. They will tell you that it is the opposite of fighting for racial equality. They will label you a turncoat, a traitor to the struggle. They will tell you that there is no Black homosexuality, only deviance.” Woodridge sighed. “Why are you here? Did some man touch you where he oughtn’t?”
everyman Page 8