everyman

by M. Shelly Conner

  Nelle thought of June Bug and salt tombs, her mother and truthful lies. She slowly shook her head. “I’m having difficulty talking about this with my best friend. She . . .”

  “You want her to be more?” Woodridge raised an eyebrow. “I’m no root doctor.”

  “I want her to keep being my best friend as I find myself.”

  Woodridge chuckled. “Do you have a map, dear?”

  Nelle’s face soured, and Woodridge rose. He opened a drawer in his secretary and stared at the contents. “Everyone wants to fly, but no one wants to be ungrounded.” He removed a preserved egg, the last in a set distributed throughout the years. “I’ve given these to students over the years. The ones, like you, that visit me for . . . personal reasons. It makes them feel special—perhaps drives them to do what they were always going to do anyway. This is the last one.” He handed the egg to Nelle.

  Nelle turned it in her hand and tilted her head toward Woodridge. “Is this meant to make me feel special?”

  “No,” Woodridge responded drily. “But what I’m going to tell you will.” He returned to his seat. “You cannot live your life for another, and you cannot hold yourself to the limitations of others. Think of that egg as the rebirth of yourself as one who knows herself capable of flight.”

  Nelle exited, leaving Woodridge to stare around his small quarters. The flourishes of color had been removed. No more soft silks danced with stoic wood sculptures or Greek statues. Everything except a few essentials—clothing, toiletries, scotch—had been neatly packed into boxes as Woodridge prepared to take flight in his own life.

  Nelle began to date, or rather hang in the company of, those who appeared as if they could potentially be intimate partners. There was the well-intentioned white girl who was enamored with Black culture. She was the only white woman who regularly attended the Black feminist events on campus. There was only a shade difference between the two, yet vast lacunae existed between their thoughts and ideals. When Nelle asked how she’d come to attend Black feminist rallies, the woman confessed to often feeling uncomfortably tokenized in those situations.

  “The issues of Black women are ignored in predominantly white feminist organizations.” Her blue eyes sparkled. “I . . . I mean to be an ally to women’s causes, for all women.”

  Nelle nodded, adding cream to her coffee.

  “Sometimes it’s hard though.”

  Nelle paused and raised an eyebrow, continuing to listen in silence.

  “I mean, don’t get me wrong, and it probably sounds so very wrong.” Her eyes gazed, appropriately troubled. “But sometimes, I just kind of feel unwelcome. You understand? Out of place being the only . . .” Her voice lowered. “. . . white woman there.”

  Nelle gazed around the coffeehouse where she had agreed to meet, in a predominantly white neighborhood near a feminist bookstore. She glanced at the prevalence of white faces, noting that she was indeed the only Black person there.

  Catching her meaning, her coffee date smiled. “I know, right. But that’s different. I mean, it’s not cool to say. I’m not saying it’s cool at all, but Black people have had to get used to that. Being the only one in places, especially colleges and political activist events.”

  That was their final coffee date. As much as she tried to be open to the idea of breaking down barriers of racial interaction, Nelle could not imagine being with someone on the most intimate of levels who, willingly or not, contributed to her own marginalization. As she gazed around spaces in which she was increasingly the only Black person, she needed to be able to share a look, smile, or touch with someone who truly shared that experience. Otherwise, she would be a token not only in public space but in her private space as well—her home, her bed. She was just beginning to imagine what sexual intimacy looked like between women. She could not fathom what it looked like between Black and white women.

  Then there was the butch, in her suit and tie and highly polished wingtips. Only a slight pitch in speech betrayed the female beneath the broad shoulders and wide stride. She told Nelle that she liked her femininity. Her heels and skirts. But when Nelle met her for coffee wearing jeans, there was an issue.

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Gloria Vanderbilt. You like?”

  “Ahem . . . Yeah, but . . . they’re not very ladylike.”

  “How can that be? I’m a lady.”

  “Yeah, but . . . I like my ladies a certain way.”

  Nelle’s face bunched in confusion. Her date leaned across the table toward her. “Look, sista. I’m gonna give you a head’s up. Save you lots of trouble. Women who look like you . . .” she pantomimed an hourglass figure, “typically date women who look like me.” She straightened her tie.

  “Why?” Nelle leaned in conspiratorially. “Why is that?”

  “Because there’s masculine energy and feminine energy . . .”

  “But we’re both women,” Nelle interjected.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  But it did to Nelle. That was their final coffee date. Nelle had unknowingly stumbled into the lesbian binary of gender identification. She enjoyed wearing skirts and platform heels just as much as she liked to wear her bell-bottom jeans and corduroys, unaware that each change of her wardrobe signaled some dress code violation within her nascent sexual identity. Nelle did not understand the gender language of this sexual politics. She had been searching for a home, yet once arrived, found herself ignorant of its cultural properties. She feared that she might just be a tourist after all, vacationing from a life less satisfying.

  Nelle was tired of coffee dates. She’d started at the beginning of the fall semester and had continued until final exams. The Alabama temperature had dropped, and Nelle’s enthusiasm was quickly following. She began spending more time in the campus library, refocusing her energy on the gothic elements present in Chopin’s The Awakening and thinking what utter despair it must take for a white woman to drown herself in the ocean.

  It was during one of these solo study sessions that Nelle caught notice of a young lady staring at her from the next table. She smiled, and the woman took it as an invitation to join her. They were in a local feminist-theories reading group. Her name was Audrey.

  They talked of class. Cixious and Beauvoir. The Feminine Mystique and The Federation of South African Women. They talked of white women who found themselves trapped in wallpapered rooms. And Black women who wished for rooms of their own. If white women were the second sex, they wondered, then what were they—as Black women—the unsexed? They got hungry and went for lunch.

  They thought of the women of the world. Colonized everywhere, even among the colonized. If the disenfranchised created methods of subversion in chitlin circuits, from the Blacks to the gays, could the same be said of women? Were there female versions of the chitlin circuit? Female enclaves resisting patriarchy. Nelle certainly didn’t think so.

  “Race will always matter,” she assured Audrey as they sipped water in the cafeteria. “Between women, race will always matter.”

  “Men too,” Audrey added. “But who gives a fuck about them?” She smiled. Their eyes sparkled, and suddenly men didn’t matter to Nelle at all. Not all men. Not any men. And certainly not Richard the pledge, entitling himself to her periphery.

  Nelle and Audrey talked until dinnertime, pooling their pocket money to splurge on two dinners at the Chicken Coop. Between bites of chicken, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese, they wondered aloud where they fit in the Black nationalist rhetoric.

  Audrey asked, “Where are women outside of traditional relationships with men?”

  Nelle’s eyes widened.

  Audrey held up her hand, “I didn’t mean to offend . . .”

  “No,” Nelle interjected. “I’m not offended.”

  “Oh, what are you?” Audrey asked. She stuck a hot-sauce-

  covered finger into her mouth and sighe
d. “My God, this is heaven.”

  Nelle watched, intrigued. Her food had sat untouched on her plate for quite some time. She averted her eyes and drank heavily from her sweet tea. When they shifted onto Audrey, she met an unflinching gaze.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  Something behind Nelle’s eyes recognized its own reflection in Audrey’s. “Yes,” she replied. “I think I am.”

  They left the restaurant and continued talking as they walked, but it was not an aimless stroll. It was not in the direction of Nelle’s dorm, where Eve sat turning the pages of Ellison’s Invisible Man. Their meandering placed them at the steps of Audrey’s dormitory. Unsure of anything, they sat on the steps and stole questioning glances at one another as what was being said became noticeably secondary to the unsaid.

  Nelle was in the midst of an explication of Black women’s roles in the Black Power movement, when Audrey interjected, “My roommate’s gone for the evening.” Embarrassed by her own outburst, she clapped her hand over her mouth in a gesture that was so girlish that Nelle felt comforted.

  “I don’t mean that . . .” Audrey began.

  Nelle laughed and grabbed her hand. “Show me your room, Audrey.” As they rose together, a figure emerged from the shadows.

  “Nelle, can we talk?”

  The whispered voice was almost difficult to distinguish from the night air, but Nelle recognized it as belonging to Richard. Nelle released Audrey’s hand. As she descended the stairs toward him, she felt her energy lowering. By the time she stood in front of him, an exhaustion had overtaken her. Nelle was tired of explaining and reexplaining to him that she no longer wanted to date.

  “Richard, we don’t have anything more to talk about.”

  “We do!” he shouted, then lowered his voice. “You have to explain why . . .”

  “I have explained it, Richard. I shouldn’t have to defend my right to date and not date whomever I want. I no longer want this.”

  “But why not? We were good together. I am good!” Richard took her hand and placed it on his chest.

  “Please don’t do that,” Nelle sighed.

  Mistaking her exhaustion for a moment of emotional weakness, he stepped forward into an embrace, muffling her response. “What’s that?” He pulled back slowly.

  “You are quickly becoming not good.” She exhaled.

  Appalled and then angry, he released her. His lips curled, “Well, you . . .”

  “Number Four!” A voice boomed toward them, startling Richard into attention.

  “Yes, Big Brother!” Richard’s eyes stared past Nelle into nothingness while she scanned behind him toward the approaching figure of LeRoi.

  LeRoi smiled at Nelle. His eyes never left her as he directed his question to Richard. “What time is it, Number Four?”

  Richard’s wrist shot up to his face. “A quarter to, Big Brother LeRoi!”

  “A quarter to what, Number Four?”

  “Ten, Big Brother LeRoi!”

  “And what happens at ten, Number Four?”

  Richard’s face betrayed his rigid attentiveness. “Curfew,” he whispered.

  “I. Can’t. Hear. You, pledge!” LeRoi’s voice thundered, and Nelle jumped slightly. She wanted to leave but felt compelled to witness Richard’s humility as a safeguard from future stalking. She was vaguely aware of Audrey waiting on the dormitory steps.

  “Curfew, Big Brother LeRoi!” Richard shouted, chancing a glance at Nelle.

  “Looks like you better be on double time then,” LeRoi responded and turned toward Nelle as Richard sprinted through the valley separating the campus into male and female dorms.

  “He won’t be a problem anymore,” LeRoi said.

  “He wouldn’t have been one in the first place if y’all didn’t fill his head with all that alpha male bullshit,” Nelle replied. “And you’re standing in my face just as smug, like I should thank you for cleaning up your own mess. Well, Big Brother LeRoi,” she sneered, “you can double-time it the fuck out of my face right behind his stalker ass.”

  LeRoi inhaled his shock and simply nodded and strolled back into the darkness. Nelle’s attention had already returned to Audrey on the steps. She had no idea how to recapture a moment that was new in the first place.

  But Audrey smiled and walked toward her. “Men make everything about men,” she said. “We’ve spent this whole glorious evening questioning how to create something between women and the last vestiges of patriarchy sends us a fraternal order of epic mannishness. I think that means we’re very close to something.” She closed the space between them.

  Audrey stood in the same close proximity that Richard had moments earlier, yet the experience was the exact opposite. Nelle felt recharged. She tried to dissect the excited tingle that started in the pit of her stomach and radiated outward to her fingertips. Unable to contain it in her mind, she decided to let it guide her, and it propelled them both up the stairs, into the dormitory, and toward Audrey’s room, where they embraced without bothering to light the darkness with either lamp provided.

  Afterward, lying in her own dorm room bed across from Eve, Nelle thought of the sweetness of her evening. “You’re the one who’s going to have to make a choice.” Her words sliced through the darkness toward Eve.

  Years later, in the movie theater watching Pam Grier’s on-screen pantomime of thrusting the delivery man’s hand into her as the cure for her same-sex relations, Eve saw an act of redemption: Grier begging to get back to the normalcy of a heterosexual home. Dirty work, but a hero’s journey.

  Nelle saw a woman used to prostituting her body for survival using her only asset to score heroin for her addicted lover. Grier was a lesbian navigating the gendered, heterosexist landscape to save her woman. It’s never pretty, but Nelle saw the beauty in it. Grier was going through hell to get back to heaven. Had she the luxury of confiding to Eve, Nelle would have giddily answered her inquiry about what women do. She would have said that it was not so different from being with a man—and that it also was extremely different from being with a man. She would have explained the familiarity and comfortable awkwardness of softness and warmth. Described it as sweet and scary. Erotic and tender. And to her, not as salty.

  Seven

  marie laveau

  Witch hunters is white women’s worry.

  —Marie Laveau,

  American Horror Story: Coven

  The past is not so much hidden as it is buried by people’s shame. They tuck it away like unopened envelopes in the far recesses of dark closets. They cram it into crawl spaces, faded chifforobes, and dusty basement storage areas. People bury the past like Edgar Allan Poe narrators—beneath floorboards and behind bricked walls, often still alive. Still relevant. To them, still shameful. In its conspicuous absence they weave stories—first omissions that absolve them of their deceit, then tall tales that glorify their presence. This faux past weaves its way into historical narrative like a wolf straining the downy-white seams of a sheep’s clothing.

  It is rumored that New Orleans Vodou priestess Marie Laveau lived an unnaturally long life and bore fifteen children. Her life has been heavily sensationalized and fictionalized in works that purport to present the past. But how many Marie Laveaus are being pressed into a single narrative? Marie Laveau I—born around 1800—had two sisters also named Marie Laveau. She had five children, but only two survived infancy. They, too, were named Marie Laveau—Marie Eucharist Heloise Laveau, known as Marie the Second and Marie Philomene Laveau. Each of these second-wave Marie Laveaus had five children.

  Written records are privileged over oral tradition, and in the burying of the past, it is the written word that must be plunged into hiding. It opens itself up to the reader, formed and solid. Nothing changes it. While the spoken history is in constant manipulation by the speaker. New tone. New emphasis. New words. New omissions. New additions. Marie Laveau II, the
eldest daughter, continued her mother’s work and perpetuated the rumors and folklore surrounding her mother in an effort to continue the legacy and blur the distinction between the real Marie Laveau and the not always accurate legacy.

  Several generations later, and far from New Orleans, the only magic that Janette Marie Laveau Baptiste possessed was in her ability to bewitch male suitors—a skill she sought to instill in her daughter Nelle, hoping that Nelle’s own Laveau magic would supply the missing element required to maintain it. For Janette Marie Laveau could charm men into her life, but nothing that she had could entreat them to remain there. Her husband, Nelle’s father, had disappeared shortly after Nelle’s birth. But it was no Laveau magic that vanquished him. In their neighborhood, single-parent households were not rare. Some men had left pregnant wives and girlfriends while they looked westward for better work. Births occurred in their absence. A few men made it through their offsprings’ early childhood years only to disappear after a quick run to the store for cigarettes . . . or in the dead of the night . . . or with another woman . . . or after being threatened by the local dope man, loan shark, gangster. Frederick Baptiste, Nelle’s father, had a penchant for all three—heroin, borrowing money that he could never repay, and gambling with borrowed money. He’d have been lucky to have made it west for work or to have found love in the arms of another, because chances were good that Frederick Baptiste spent Nelle’s formative years at the bottom of a shallow grave.

  About the time Nelle befriended Eve, her mother had taken up with a man called June Bug—Uncle June Bug to Nelle, who had acquired many temporary uncles over the course of her young life. She had had Uncle Paul, Uncle Harry, and Uncle Harold, and Nelle was growing tired of sharing her mother. She was tired in the way of young girls who feel more than they are yet able to comprehend.

  Her mother managed to hold on to June Bug for three years—although to those who observed them, it wasn’t a feat of difficulty or merit. June Bug rarely worked. He was a man of small stature who compensated for it with a loud voice and a lot of talk. He was always tapping a foot or fidgeting with his hands. And when his eyes, which often darted fervently around the room, fixed themselves on ten-year-old Nelle, Janette Marie Laveau immediately took notice of his notice.