Only the Strong

by Jabari Asim

  Students crossing the plaza during the fall semester, swaddled against the cold and exhaling fat plumes of steam, often saw the two of them engaged in passionate discussions, trading arguments as if the fate of the world hung in the balance.

  “We don’t have the weapons,” Percy would say with a sigh. “We don’t have the resources, we don’t have the wherewithal. It takes all that to overcome systematic oppression. And all that talk of revolution doesn’t sufficiently address our complicity in our own mistreatment. For Du Bois, this was an unavoidable question: whether or nor the slavery and degradation of Negroes in America has not been unnecessarily prolonged by the submission to evil. We put up with it, in other words.”

  “So we’re all Uncle Toms,” Charlotte would offer in return, prompting Percy to shake his head.

  “No, no, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying let’s put aside all the bluster about offing whitey and face the fact that our real gift is endurance. It’s the only thing we have real confidence in. We pray without ceasing, sister, that slow and steady will one day win the race.”

  By October, passersby likely would have missed them hunkered down in a dimly lit corner of the chapel, with little beside body heat and rhetoric to keep them warm. Percy would be standing, gesturing dramatically, or pacing with his hands deep in his pockets. Charlotte would be sitting comfortably (as comfortably as possible, that is) on a blanket, wrapped up in her oversize men’s coat and wondering when Percy would pause in his delivery and lean in for a kiss.

  “Life is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short,” he’d exclaim. “Hobbes hit it on the head, didn’t he? He was no James Brown but he wasn’t half bad.”

  Charlotte would toss him an exaggerated come-hither look. “Is that how you make a move on a woman? You just keep quoting philosophers? Funny.”

  “Maybe,” he’d say, finally leaning closer. “But you know what’s funnier? You keep listening.”

  Finally, acting on an anonymous tip, the maintenance man got wise to their makeshift camp in the chapel and chased them out. They ran, puffing and giggling until they collapsed at the feet of the Soldiers. They shared shots of cocoa from Percy’s battered aluminum thermos. Savoring the heat rising from the thermos cap in her cupped hands, Charlotte asked him why he chose River Valley.

  “I’m a legacy, bound by blood. You’re looking at the son of a bricklayer who taught his craft right here on this venerable campus. The Conways have gone from tradesman to aspiring philosopher in a single generation. I’m telling you, the Talented Tenth’s got nothing on us.”

  Charlotte sighed, watching the steam vanish into the frigid air. “That’s way more than I can claim,” she said.

  “Aw, don’t be so hard on your people. No doubt you’re familiar with the spirit of the age. How does the song go? Oh, yes, ‘We shall overcome.’ Any and all obstacles, including humble origins. Greek societies, Black and Tans, colored aristocracies—all exposed as corrupt traditions, the blueblood perversions of a bygone age. If straw can be made into bricks, then men and women, no matter how lowly, can be molded into models of purpose and accomplishment. Just don’t call us New Negroes.”

  Charlotte looked at the ground, her jaw clenched. He lowered himself beside her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know when to stop.” He put his arm around her and waited.

  “I don’t know my father,” she said. “Mother either. Somebody left me on a doorstep.”

  “Who? How?”

  She shook her head. “Your guess is as good as mine. They put me in different foster houses. I refuse to call them homes. Sometimes I was an excuse for a check; sometimes the man of the house had eyes on me. If I fought or ran away, they put me down as a troublemaker. Nobody wants someone like that sharing a room with their real children, disturbing their peace. I got too big, too old. Everybody wanted babies. I lived at a children’s home until Dr. Noel took me in.”

  They sat in silence. The cocoa cooled and Charlotte’s fingers grew numb inside her gloves.

  “Do you ever think about finding them?”

  “I used to. Not anymore.”

  “If you did find them, what would you say?”

  “I’d tell them that I wasn’t looking for anything, especially love. I’d tell them it’s too late for that. I’d just want to know who they were. Why they gave me up.”

  “I couldn’t imagine that.”

  Charlotte shifted her hips and looked him in the eye. “Imagine what? Not knowing your people?”

  “No. Giving you up.”

  CHARLOTTE DISCOVERED THAT being unable to imagine giving her up was not the same as being unable to actually cut her loose. The campus grapevine told her that Percy devoted the fall semester of every year to seducing some starry-eyed freshman with his amazing mind and golden tongue. The speeches he’d given Charlotte, the grapevine said, he had most certainly given before. The ultimate result was always the same. Percy would get in the wind while the smitten girl sobbed all the way to her sophomore year.

  Charlotte knew that wasn’t the complete picture. Percy delighted in her, but with a genial affection that fell short of devotion. He could take her or leave her, and some days he left her. He’d slink in quietly to Music Appreciation after Dr. Harrison’s lecture had already begun, and race out without so much as a glance in Charlotte’s direction. She felt him go without turning around, sensed him sprinting feverishly down the hall in a headlong rush to who knows where.

  Sorority girls and cheerleaders harrumphed and tittered when she went by. Her sudden solitariness confirmed their initial suspicions: she was an ignorant upstart who didn’t know the first thing about romance. Did she really think that marching around in a baggy man’s coat with her hair piled up under a cap was the way to go? She was backwards, country, peculiar. And the smartest man on campus had her on a string.

  She found comfort and moral support in the company of her roommate, Laurie Jo Pippen. If Charlotte were compelled to describe her new friend in a single word, it would have been homespun. An unpretentious education major from Kinloch, Missouri, Laurie Jo wore dresses that her mother had stitched together on the family Singer and that the other girls on campus found laughably out of style. “Somebody should let that poor thing know that this is the seventies,” a classmate would whisper. Laurie Jo would turn around and face her critics with a grin. “Talk louder,” she’d advise, “’cause Laurie Jo can’t hear you.” The only time she didn’t wear a dress was when she donned cutoffs to race Alphonso Jordan, a loudmouth sophomore from Jefferson City. She beat him by 10 yards and Alphonso hid out for the rest of the semester.

  Laurie Jo took matters in hand when she returned to Taplin Hall one Friday afternoon and found Charlotte moping about the room.

  “You know what you need? Some home-cooked vittles. Come to Kinloch with me this weekend. You can’t beat my mama’s biscuits with a stick. She can put ten pounds on you in two days.”

  “You’re sure your family won’t mind? It would beat sitting with the Soldiers, watching my nails grow. You guys don’t really say ‘vittles,’ do you?”

  “Not really,” said Laurie Jo, tossing her overnight bag on top of her bed. “I got that off The Beverly Hillbillies.”

  Laurie Jo was the oldest of three girls. Her father ran a tire and wrecker service. The busybodies on campus figured the Pippen household was a homestead complete with an outhouse, a chicken coop, and a rusted, wheel-less tractor resting on blocks. In reality, it was more like a well-oiled machine. Laurie Jo’s parents split the chores at home and at work. While Mr. Pippen hauled errant cars from ditches and patched up steel-belted radials, Mrs. Pippen managed the billing and balanced the books. While Mrs. Pippen fried the chicken and mashed the potatoes, Mr. Pippen swept the floors and washed the clothes. Meanwhile, the girls pitched in with their own tasks, moving through each room with precision and skill. Charlotte helped but mostly watched admiringly as the Pippens kept a steady pace without ever bumping into each other.

  She
reveled in the harmony enveloping the Pippens’ table, almost forgetting her recent difficulties with Percy. The food, the laughter, the easy, warmhearted bantering—it was an orphan’s dream, and Charlotte shamelessly lapped it up. She wondered, too, why her own experience had been so starkly opposite, what trick of genetics had made Laurie Jo and not her the daughter of Moses and Jackie Pippen.

  Ed had a similar family. Once she’d entered the Jones home with Ed and found his mom sitting on his dad’s lap, spooning warm cake into his mouth. The adults paused to offer greetings but quickly returned their attention to each other. Charlotte felt somewhat awed, but Ed, as usual, seemed ashamed. He often behaved as if his family’s closeness was bourgeois and “counterrevolutionary,” one of his favorite words. Unlike him, Laurie Jo was matter-of-fact about her situation. She knew her family life was special, but the way she moved about her house suggested that she expected nothing less, as if specialness could be a birthright.

  After dinner, when the dishes had been put away and the house was quiet, Charlotte and Laurie Jo stayed up late. When Charlotte told her about her own far less fortunate upbringing, Laurie Jo took it in stride like she did everything else. On campus, Laurie Jo was voluptuous and friendly, but men seemed a little afraid of her. She had round cheekbones that glowed when she smiled. She was faster and stronger than many of her male peers but didn’t hold it against them. She regarded her lack of a boyfriend with patience instead of frustration. “I have a good thing here at home,” she told Charlotte. “It’s going to take a real man to make me want to leave.”

  The next day, Charlotte accompanied Laurie Jo and Mr. Pippen to their woodshed, which he had converted into a firing range. All of the Pippen women had become crack shooters under his tutelage. “I want them to be able to protect themselves,” he explained, “in case no one else is around to do it.”

  He showed Charlotte how to hold and load a pistol. Although the black metal was surprisingly heavy resting on her palm, it felt more reassuring than dangerous. Mr. Pippen helped Charlotte squeeze off a few rounds before Laurie Jo peppered the homemade target with a series of perfectly aimed shots.

  “I should have known you can shoot,” Charlotte said. “I bet you can hunt too.”

  “Of course she can,” Mr. Pippen said.

  “That’s right,” Laurie Jo agreed. “If you like my homemade dresses, you should see my Christmas coat. I made it myself from squirrels I shot.”

  Charlotte gasped, imagining the furry thing. “Just kidding,” Laurie Jo said. Charlotte sighed, relieved, while Mr. Pippen laughed so hard he nearly split his britches. He walked the girls back to the house before heading off to his shop.

  In the kitchen, Laurie Jo and Charlotte made sandwiches from leftovers. “Have you ever had to shoot?” Charlotte asked. “I mean at a human being.”

  “No,” Laurie Jo replied. “But I could if I had to. Next time Tish starts mouthing off at you, tell her that. Tell her I’m looking out.”

  Instead of a punch line, Tish Grant had almost been an invited guest. But she had forced Laurie Jo to choose between her and Charlotte, and Laurie Jo had been happy to oblige. Tish had spent much of fall semester blithely ignoring her fellow freshmen while strutting under the watchful wing of her indulgent dad, a round-bellied man who appeared to love shiny cufflinks, cigars, and pinky rings as much as he loved his little girl.

  “She is one spoiled individual,” Laurie Jo had said the first time they gossiped about her. “Her father’s so overprotective that no boy will go near her. Tish. What kind of name is that for a colored girl?”

  Charlotte grinned. “What kind of name is Laurie Jo?”

  Laurie Jo ignored her. “You ever noticed how long she ties up the phone? The line of girls in the hall will be five or six deep and she doesn’t even bat an eye. Going ‘Daddy, this’ and ‘Daddy, that’ like the old man’s made of money. And the way she waltzes through the dining hall? Like she’s fine as the queen of Sheba.”

  Tish was as dark as bittersweet chocolate and looked every bit as delicious. There wasn’t a cat in the world that could slink through the jungle with such supple splendor. Some girls who looked like her struggled under their burden of beauty; they trudged tentatively as it pressed its weight on their lovely, fragile shoulders. Not Tish. Sloe-eyed, she wore her pulchritude with pride as she swung her delectable curves through the drooling masses with her mouth slightly parted, color shimmering on her perfect lips.

  On those unexpected but oddly welcome occasions when she acknowledged Charlotte and Laurie Jo’s existence, Tish proved a candid and attentive companion. Days she passed by Charlotte and Laurie Jo on campus with a nod or a raised eyebrow; nights she was a fount of knowledge and sardonic commentary. She knew how to avoid getting pregnant, how to get sex stains off a car seat, how to make a lover shout your name. Charlotte and Laurie Jo wondered how she could accumulate so much experience under her father’s watchful eye. From what they could tell, Tish was double-majoring in sex and shopping. From what Tish could tell, Charlotte was a devoted student of just one subject: Percy Conway. The poor girl’s lack of knowledge was going to lead her down a bad road. One night in the study lounge, Tish took it upon herself to enlighten her.

  “Percy?” she asked, interrupting Charlotte’s monologue, although she knew perfectly well that he was the topic of discussion. “He’s just a motor-mouthed schoolboy.”

  Charlotte hissed. “He’s nobody’s boy. He’s 23.” Charlotte had grown fond of telling people that.

  Tish sighed and shook her head. “Listen, you virgins, while I educate you.”

  Charlotte said nothing to refute her. She had spent many sultry nights in Ed Jones’s bedroom sweating and writhing while Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane spun seductive rhythms on the nearby stereo. Since then, Percy had shown her the delights of the garden—the wonderfully private, gated campus garden named after George Washington Carver—and introduced her to other sacred rites during their feverish couplings in the chapel. By no means, then, was she was a stranger to what Tish was fond of calling “a good dickin’ down.” She wasn’t ashamed and had certainly exchanged confidences with Laurie Jo. She just didn’t want Tish in her business.

  “Okay, he’s not a boy. He’s a male type. That’s what most of them are around here: male types. They have outside plumbing and fuzz on their balls, but they aren’t men. When they lean close to kiss you, you can smell their mama’s titty milk on their lips and tongue. They want to suck on you for nourishment because they’re still growing. Men, though? They’re already fed. That’s why I like a man with something around his middle. With a man like that it’s only the sweetness he wants and he knows it don’t come free. Male types ain’t too proud to beg, but men know better than to come up on you with empty pockets. Take a look at this.”

  Tish leaned forward and showed off the necklace gleaming on her throat.

  “Looks like a diamond,” Laurie Jo said. “Is that a diamond?”

  “Maybe,” Tish replied.

  Laurie Jo’s eyes grew big. “Girl,” she said, “what did you have to do to get that?”

  Tish purred. “If you knew, you wouldn’t be calling me girl.”

  “What would your father say?” Charlotte asked. All that talk of “male types” had turned her stomach. She wanted to bring Tish down a peg.

  But Tish just laughed. “What my father don’t know don’t hurt him.”

  Charlotte drifted, thinking again about Ed. Sweet Ed, steadfast, devoted, and already an afterthought. Like Tish’s suitors, he always wanted to give her things. When Charlotte told him it was over, he gave her a bracelet that remained on the dresser in her room at Artinces’s house, still in its original box. They were going to different schools, the distance was too great, they were better off ending as friends, she said. Ed told her she was breaking his heart, but she knew that deep down he had reached the same conclusion. Since then, she’d never written Ed and he’d never contacted her, except once when she opened a parcel postmarke
d Cambridge, Massachusetts, and slowly removed a charcoal sketch, matted and framed. It was an 8½-by-11 portrait of her naked. Ed had been fond of sketching her while she stretched out on his bed, smiling and waiting for the moment when he couldn’t stand it any longer, when he’d grab hold of her as if he would never let go.

  Artinces asked about Ed when she visited for parents’ weekend. Charlotte hadn’t asked her to come and was more pleased than she expected to be when the doctor called and suggested it. The dining hall served steak, one of the two occasions (the other was homecoming) when it featured something more tasty—and identifiable—than its usual mystery meat. Artinces, though, suggested they skip that momentous fare in favor of a restaurant in town, a place that wasn’t particularly fancy but nonetheless too expensive for Charlotte to ever sample on her own. Charlotte had hoped to bring Percy along, but he had made himself scarce. Over pork chops stuffed with bacon and apples, she reminded Artinces that she and Ed had agreed to be just friends.

  “And he’s gone along with that?”

  “So far. He’s written me only once and I haven’t written him at all.”

  Artinces looked at Charlotte over the edge of her teacup. “What did his letter say?”

  “It wasn’t a letter really. It was a drawing he’d made of me.”

  Artinces said nothing, prompting Charlotte to wonder if the doctor somehow knew that it wasn’t just any old drawing. Then, looking at Artinces, she concluded that her thoughts were elsewhere. Although the doctor’s behavior was as prim and dignified as ever, she still seemed somehow altered from her stalwart Gateway City persona. She appeared restless, full of an excitement she could barely conceal. Charlotte wanted to tell her about Percy, but when she opened her mouth, something entirely different spilled out.

  “Dr. N., have you ever been in love?”

  Artinces, who had been merely moving her food around her plate, carefully cut her meat into smaller and smaller slices. Charlotte vaguely suspected that she was in a hurry to get somewhere.