Only the Strong

by Jabari Asim

  “I had dalliances here and there,” Artinces finally said. “But when I was in school I really wanted to concentrate on doing well and making it through.”

  “But what about when you weren’t in school? What about now?”

  Artinces set her fork down without lifting any food to her lips. She looked up from her plate. “I had to make difficult decisions, you see. At first I didn’t have time—didn’t make time—for love. And now…I’m still facing hard choices. Have you had enough, or would you like some dessert too?”

  Artinces rarely moved slowly, whipping through hospital corridors with the tail of her lab coat swirling behind her, or marching resolutely to a committee hearing with a reporter at each elbow. She moved even faster, however, after wrapping up dinner with Charlotte. Dropping her baffled protégée off near Taplin Hall, she gave her a quick hug and kiss and zipped off into the night. Charlotte lingered under the streetlamp outside her dorm, sniffing. The doctor had smelled different. Charlotte, unfamiliar with cigars and bourbon, couldn’t identify the scents.

  When she got to her room, Laurie Jo was reclined on her bed with a Jet magazine on her lap. Tish was admiring herself in the mirror.

  “Look who’s here,” Laurie Jo said. “How was your dinner with the doctor?”

  “Fine,” Charlotte replied. Tish’s presence irritated her, although she wasn’t sure why.

  “Was it just the two of you?”

  Charlotte wished that Laurie Jo had waited until they were alone before throwing questions at her. But she plopped down on her bed and answered anyway.

  “Just us two. I couldn’t find Percy anywhere. Not at the Soldiers, not at his room.”

  “Hmm,” Laurie Jo said. “What do you think he was doing?”

  “Probably the nasty,” Tish said. “On Sorority Row.”

  Charlotte stood. “You saw him?”

  “Didn’t have to. Why do you make a big mystery out of everything?”

  “What are you saying?”

  Tish continued to study her reflection. “It’s not like I’m beating around the bush. If he’s a man like you say he is, then he has a man’s needs. He wants to do more than talk. Lots of females around here will give him that.”

  “He can get whatever he needs from me.”

  “Yeah? Did he tell you that? You’re the last one to see that all he needs from you is somebody to clap every time he farts.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  Tish finally turned and faced Charlotte. “Jealous? Honey, I don’t want your job. I could have it if I wanted it, but I got more pride than that.”

  “Hush, Tish,” Laurie Jo advised, but Tish foolishly kept talking.

  “All the senior girls laugh at you,” Tish continued. “They say Percy slides around campus dribbling spit and you follow behind, licking it up.”

  Charlotte slapped Tish. The beauty fell back against the wall hard, but quickly regained her feet. Later, Laurie Jo would describe the slap as resembling the motion behind Satchel Paige’s windmill fastball. “First there was the windup,” she’d say to anyone who asked, “then there was the pitch,” a violent whirlwind of overhead motion. In truth, Laurie Jo, sensing what was coming, had winced and looked away at the moment of impact. Tish, no stranger to a scuffle, admired Charlotte’s quickness even as she felt its sting. She pressed her fingers to her cheek and smiled.

  “So that’s how it is?”

  Charlotte nodded. “That’s how it is.”

  Laurie Jo managed to escort Tish out before more blows were thrown. She walked back down the hall looking subdued and remorseful. Once inside the room, she broke into a wide grin. “Girl, you cleaned her clock,” she said to Charlotte. “She should have known better than to jump salty with you.”

  An awkward enmity developed between Charlotte and Tish, one that occasionally erupted into nose-to-nose clashes that Laurie Jo or someone else quickly stepped in to defuse. For most of the year their feud would simply smolder, sustained by hissed insults and mutual eye rolling. Although she kept her chin up and faced Tish without fear, Charlotte struggled with the recognition that her rival had the upper hand. True, Charlotte had enjoyed the visceral pleasure of wiping Tish’s nauseating smirk right off her face. But Tish basked in the glory that came from being right. Percy would soon vanish like a ghost, withdrawing from all his classes. His phone would be disconnected, the puritanical Holy Roller who rented him a room off campus would decline to account for his whereabouts, and he wouldn’t bother to leave behind so much as a letter or forwarding address for Charlotte.

  The morning after the epic slap, however, Charlotte’s thoughts were far from Tish Grant. To avoid dining-hall chatter about their fight, she’d slipped out early and taken a long, head-clearing walk to a diner at the edge of the black community. Her plan was to eat breakfast in peace and solitude. But Percy had introduced her to the place. Without him the eggs and toast seemed cold and unappetizing, and the bits and pieces of conversation that she overheard lacked his customary wit. She choked down as much as she could before stepping outside. Across the street from a gas station, she spotted Artinces’s car rolling away from the lot. She waited for it to approach, prepared to wave as it passed by. But the car quickly gathered speed and, as it whizzed past her, she saw that Artinces wasn’t behind the wheel. Charlotte caught only a rakishly tilted hat, a snatch of jaw, and a cigar clenched between generous lips before the car zoomed out of sight. Charlotte stared after it, imagining Artinces in the passenger seat, leaning affectionately on the shoulder of her mysterious lover.

  “Hard choices,” Charlotte muttered.

  As weeks came and went without any sign of Percy, rumors haunted Charlotte’s every step. Speculation included catastrophic illness, a shotgun wedding, and solemnly sworn Sorority Row testimony that Percy had been spotted chopping weeds on a Southern chain gang.

  After banging out her last essay of the semester on the state-of-the-art typewriter Artinces had bought for her, Charlotte got up from her desk and tossed herself onto her bed. Her room was quiet. Like many other students, Laurie Jo had already departed for winter break. Outside Charlotte’s door, the Taplin hallways were desolate. Charlotte sighed and flopped an arm over her eyes.

  She was halfway between sleep and wakefulness when a spray of pebbles rained softly against her window. She got up and looked outside. Percy was in the courtyard below.

  “Hey, Beautiful!” he shouted when he saw her. “Let me up before I get arrested for disturbance of the peace.”

  She opened her window. “Where have you been?”

  “Medical leave,” he said. “But enough about me. Are you going to let me up there?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’m going to start singing. Then they’ll take me to jail. Do I look like a criminal to you?”

  He smiled, and she couldn’t help smiling back. “There you go,” he said.

  “My RA will never let you up.”

  “Please. I tutored her through Differential Calc. She owes me her life.”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I was about to go to bed.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to close this window.”

  “All right then, you give me no choice.” He took a dramatic breath. “Can’t turn you loose,” he wailed. “Let me in, let me in—”

  “Okay! Come up. But quit with the Sam Cooke.”

  “Actually, this is my Otis Redding. You want to hear my Sam?”

  Up close, Percy looked gleeful, wild-eyed, a little frightening. His hair, neatly cropped when school began in August, was now lengthy and barely tamed, and glistening with flakes of snow. His shirt and pants were clean but disheveled, and his thin suit jacket offered little protection against winter. His face had an unsettling sheen. He came in and immediately tried to kiss her on the lips but she gave him her cheek.

  “The cold shoulder. Okay, I deserve that. Look, I brought you something.”
r />   Charlotte folded her arms across her chest. “Make it good. I expect a man like you to do better than candy or flowers.”

  “Two things.” He reached in an inside pocket and pulled out a cassette. “An eight-track recording of The Magic Flute. Pretty good, huh?”

  “Pretty good,” she agreed. “Thank you.” She took the tape and studied the label. She wasn’t looking at him when he reached into his jacket a second time.

  “And this.” Charlotte looked up and saw Percy presenting a gun as if it were an engagement ring. A .38-caliber revolver, it looked much like the one she had held and shot at Laurie Jo’s house, except it was older and tarnished instead of shiny.

  She pressed her hand to her throat. “Percy, what are you doing with that? I don’t want it.”

  “There’s a box of bullets too. I need you to take it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I trust you. More than I trust myself.”

  Percy explained that parents’ weekend fell on the anniversary of his father’s death. It had been too much for him to take, and when the weekend had passed he decided the semester was also too much, so he applied for and received a medical leave. Since then, he’d spent most of the time holed up in his room, “resting and healing.”

  Charlotte struggled to organize her many questions so that she could ask them one at a time.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” she said. “How did he die?”

  “He killed himself. With this gun.”

  Charlotte shuddered. She took the gun from Percy’s outstretched hand. Remembering Mr. Pippen’s training, she checked to make sure it wasn’t loaded, then placed it carefully on her dresser.

  “Why did he do it?”

  “For the same reason I talk all the time. To shut them up.”

  “Shut who up?”

  “The voices. He heard them. I hear them.”

  Charlotte remembered the first time she encountered Percy at the Soldiers. She had had the feeling that she’d interrupted a conversation. But no one else was around. He had seemed so relieved when she walked up.

  “Voices. What do they tell you?”

  “That I’m going to die.”

  Percy lowered himself to the floor, resting his back against the side of Charlotte’s bed. The room’s harsh light exposed the dark circles under eyes that had gleamed with excitement just moments before.

  Charlotte had never heard voices. She had wished for death though, more than once, before deciding that she had been reading too many poems about longing and despair. She sat down beside him. “Don’t listen to them,” she said.

  Percy smiled. “Easy for you to say. What if they’re right?”

  “We’re all going to die, Percy. There’s no point in thinking about it all the time. When you told me you took time off to care for a loved one…you were talking about yourself, weren’t you?”

  Percy nodded. He grabbed her hand without turning to look for it. Charlotte reached out and gently took hold of his chin. She turned his face toward hers. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “I knew you’d be leaving soon. I owed you an explanation.”

  “Will you be in school next semester?”

  “I expect to.”

  “And what about us?”

  “I hope that we’ll be friends.”

  Charlotte let go of his chin. She couldn’t help laughing bitterly. “It figures,” she said.

  “What figures?”

  “The whole ‘friends’ thing. The sorority girls told me you break a young girl’s heart every year. Do you try to scare them off with the same story?”

  “I’ve had other girls. But I’ve never dumped them. I simply tell them the truth. Just like I’m telling you.”

  “What did they say?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m guessing they were angry. Maybe scared. Like I am.”

  “I wanted them to stick around,” Percy said. “I couldn’t blame them when they didn’t. But there’s a difference this time. I don’t want you to stay.”

  “Why? Because you don’t think you can rely on me? Because you think I’ll turn tail and run at the first sign of problems?”

  Percy shook his head. “Because I care so much more for you.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Charlotte snapped. “I’ll hate you for it.”

  “I’d rather you hate me than love me.”

  “Stop! You’re talking crazy.”

  “Only because I am crazy. You’re brilliant, Charlotte, more than you know. You’re incredibly beautiful. When I first saw you in Music Appreciation, I said to myself, hurry up and impress this girl before someone else does. And you’re tough, really tough. If I were just a little bit different than I am, we’d be perfect. But you can’t fix me. Nobody can.”

  Percy stretched out on his back and rested his head against Charlotte. Soon he fell asleep. She got up carefully and turned off the light. A wedge of moonlight glowed through a seam in the drawn curtains, illuminating Percy’s still form. She returned to the floor and sat with her knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her shins.

  On the riverfront, Mozart hummed in Charlotte’s ears. The mud-splattered tug had puttered away. The paddle steamer rested in the near distance alongside the gangplank that tourists walked across to embark on sightseeing tours. Clouds crept across the face of the sun, casting the entire scene in shades of gray. Perhaps an hour of daylight remained. Charlotte turned off the tape player. Shouts and laughter occasionally interrupted the soft slap of the river against the cobblestones, reminding her that the riverfront bars would soon be packed with partygoers, dockworkers, and drunks. She stood, brushed off her pants, and walked to her car.

  That first night with Percy, when she sat with him near the Soldiers, he encouraged her to imagine the concrete, bench-ringed plaza as a body of water. “See the light dancing serenely on the surface,” he said, “see the rippling currents.” His voice was hypnotic, seductive.

  “I used to marvel about boats,” he said. “I love their beauty, their sublime usefulness. I used to tell myself that one day I’d have a boat of my own, maybe even live on it. I can think of few human inventions so wonderful. Somewhere near the dawn of civilization, an ancestor pushed a hollow log into the sea and climbed inside. And from that simple act, transport became more than walking or wheels, more than moving with the ground always beneath you. It meant steering by the stars, depending on the wind. Seeing new worlds, new people. Sometimes just floating. Floating.”

  Watching him, listening to him, Charlotte promised herself that she wouldn’t fall too easily, that she’d make him work. She’d just gotten to college and she had big plans. How dare he lure her so brazenly, with his imagination and his dreamy language?

  “Time passed,” he continued, “and we turned wonders into weapons, just like we do everything else. We used them to carry blankets infected with smallpox, dragged people in chains into nightmares they hadn’t imagined, loaded their decks with cannonballs and bombs. All of that ugly history began to ruin my visions of serenity. It occurred to me that dreaming of boats might possibly be better than actually having one. So here I sit.”

  Surprising herself, Charlotte asked him if a slave was better off dreaming of freedom instead of actually being free.

  He looked at her a long moment. “Shut my mouth,” he said with a smile. “I knew you were trouble.”

  BEFORE ANANIAS GOODE SHARED his swelling fortune with his best friend Miles Washington, enabling the man of God to build a sparkling new edifice for his flock, Good Samaritan Methodist Church occupied a smaller building on the eastern edge of North Gateway. Back then, neighborhood regulars called it “the children’s church,” because its front steps were known as a place where an unwanted infant could be safely deposited. That durable tradition likely prompted unknown hands to leave a baby girl, just two weeks old, on those very steps in 1952.

  Charlotte had no memory of that, of course, and the adults who’d brought her this far
in the world had not encouraged her to dwell on the unfortunate circumstances of her earliest days. She did reflect upon them from time to time, such as when she sat down at the Jones family dinner table during her high school romance with Ed, or when she spent a joyful weekend with Laurie Jo’s bustling clan. Mostly, though, she saw no point in trying to hold on to such potentially dispiriting details. There was more value, she discovered, in letting them go. She said as much—wrote it, actually—in the essay that secured her a full scholarship to River Valley A&M.

  “Old people talk like it takes years and years of living before you can start talking about memories,” she wrote. “But I’ve lived so much and taken on so many memories that if I could, I would forget just about everything. That’s wishful thinking and I don’t waste much time with that. Wishing, I mean. For most of my life, thinking’s all I’ve had.”

  It was her precocious thoughtfulness, or rather the suggestion of such qualities on her infant face, that first caught the attention of Miss Shirley Griffin, the church secretary who discovered the wriggling bundle in a basket on the steps. “Look like she’s thinking on something important, don’t she?” she said to Rev. Washington as the two of them admired the church’s latest foundling. Miss Shirley had already washed and changed the baby girl and fed her from the bottle of formula that had been stuffed alongside her in the basket. She had wrapped her in one of the many blankets that the church kept on hand for precisely such events.

  “Well, she definitely has something on her mind,” Rev. Washington said, smiling. “Any clues as to how she came to us?”

  “No,” said Miss Shirley, “except for this.” She held up a woman’s kerchief. It was a souvenir of sorts, with names of North Carolina cities embroidered on its rayon surface. “She was wrapped in it.”

  “Hmm,” said the reverend, examining the scarf. “That will at least give us a name for her if nothing else.”

  Miss Shirley frowned. “Raleigh? Caroline?”

  Rev. Washington chuckled. “Of course not, Miss Shirley. Charlotte. It has to be Charlotte.” He took the infant in his arms. “Welcome to the world, little one,” he said. “May God’s abundance be yours.”