by Jabari Asim
Babies left in Good Samaritan’s good graces acquired last names reflecting the godly protection that had ensured their safe arrival. Accordingly, kindergarten teachers at the neighborhood school were seldom surprised to look at their class lists and find a Paradise, Blessing, or Providence tucked among the Smiths, Joneses, and Johnsons. Gazing at little Charlotte’s glowing brown face, Rev. Washington decreed that her appearance that morning had been nothing less than Divine.
Those little Paradises and Blessings, so fortunate to land in the cushioning embrace of Miss Shirley or some other capable parishioner, often found that God’s protection didn’t necessarily extend beyond the church walls. Some of them indeed joined households that weren’t yet complete until they arrived, creating families bound and sustained by an all-abiding love. Others, like Charlotte, became rolling stones who passed under many roofs without ever finding a place that could truly be called home.
Throughout her journeys, Charlotte held on to the scarf. She carried it carefully from foster home to foster home. Even on occasions when she ran away, she was mindful of it. When Artinces learned of its significance, she convinced Charlotte to have it framed and mounted on the wall in her bedroom.
Her bedroom! Charlotte had never enjoyed her own space. She appreciated everything Artinces had given her—the car, the clothes, the kindness. She was especially grateful for the room. She had endured many roommates by then, though not long enough to ever form a genuine friendship. At college, Laurie Jo was a terrific roommate, but Charlotte tired even of her sometimes, craving the solitude of her bedroom in Gateway City. Like Charlotte, Laurie Jo could speak fondly of the virtues of privacy. She had shared sleeping quarters with her sisters until adolescence, when her parents mercifully allowed her to claim four walls of her own. But she had alternatives even then, including her parents’ spacious back porch, and their yard, big enough to include a swing set and a seesaw. She shuddered when Charlotte told her about waking covered in a bedmate’s sweat, piss, or worse, and she smiled appreciatively when Charlotte bragged about the dimensions of her room in Artinces’s house. “Is it warm?” she once asked. “Warm?” Charlotte replied. “I bet you could fry bacon on my desk.”
Laurie Jo laughed. “It’s wonderful to feel safe, isn’t it?” Charlotte knew her friend meant well, but her smile vanished just the same. “I could never feel safe,” she said. “There’s no such thing. Not for me, anyway.”
She explained that instead of a strong father who shooed away strangers, she’d had a foster parent who pinched her, squeezed her, and wiggled his tongue at her whenever his wife’s back was turned. Instead of a mother who sewed dresses, she had a skinny, nervous woman who never stopped smoking, reeked of beer, and kept little in her refrigerator except a jar of mayonnaise and a tin of sardines. When she got older and lived in the relative security of the children’s home, Charlotte was nearly raped behind the old Comet Theatre on Washington Boulevard. A shortcut behind the shuttered cinema turned out to be a mistake when a growling stranger dragged her down from behind.
“I fought back,” she told Laurie Jo, “but he was too strong. I thought it was over for me.”
“What happened?”
“This man came out of nowhere and saved me.”
“Thank God,” Laurie Jo said.
“Thank Guts.”
“What?”
“Guts. I found out later that his name was Guts.”
After Guts Tolliver stomped her assailant to a bloody pulp, all the while urging her to run away without looking back, Charlotte kept to herself even more than usual. She avoided Ed and everyone else, wrestling with a conclusion that was as sickening as it was perhaps inevitable: somehow, it all had to be her fault. The perverted foster fathers, the would-be rapist, they were attracted to her because of something she was doing. Was she giving off a scent? Showing too much flesh? She turned her collar against men’s ugliness by trying to make herself unattractive. She decided they would see little of her besides her eyebrows.
She began to wear men’s hats and men’s jackets big enough to drown in, thinking they would smother whatever signals she was transmitting, throw predators off her trail. She couldn’t bring herself to cut her hair, so she wound it into a single long braid that she tucked into the back of her shirt. Her costumes may have turned off a few men and prompted wisecracks from some of the clueless coeds on Sorority Row, but they never fooled the PeeWees of the world, who sniffed after her anyway. Nor did it dissuade Percy, who claimed he was dazzled by her beauty the first time he saw her. As their relationship warmed, he told her that not even a croaker sack could distract from her good looks. “You’d climb out of that sack just like Venus rising out of that shell,” he cooed. “One look at you and Botticelli would have dropped his brush.”
One thing about being dumped on a doorstep is you lose all your blood connections, not just your mother and father. At first Charlotte hung on every word when Percy shared anecdotes about his grandmothers, especially the one he called Mama Ruth. When he misbehaved as a young boy, she’d make him cut a switch from the weeping willow tree in her front yard. After dozens of such stories, Charlotte’s fascination turned to envy and she couldn’t wait for him to shut up. Charlotte also resented the pictures of grandmothers published in Ebony magazine. Gray haired, honey voiced, probably smelling like sweet potato pie, wire-rimmed glasses dangling from a chain. The closest she ever came to having a grandmother was when she was nine. That year, she was kept by Mrs. Speight, a foster mother who also provided day care for toddlers in her small, neat flat. Unlike many of Charlotte’s guardians, Mrs. Speight was a straight shooter with no criminal tendencies. Her one vice, if you could call it that, was watching Let’s Go to the Races on TV. Perched in her threadbare easy chair with Charlotte sitting at her feet, she dozed off during the Kroger grocery commercials, then sat up suddenly at the blare of the starter’s bugle and the racetrack announcer’s loud “and they’re off!”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Charlotte’s time with Mrs. Speight inspired a brief but intense fascination with horses. Her bookshelves in Artinces’s house included Misty of Chincoteague, King of the Wind, and other remnants of that obsession. When Mrs. Speight died of a stroke, Charlotte was again left to her own devices. For months afterward, Charlotte rode horses in her dreams. Sometimes she was astride a wild stallion, thundering across an island plain. Other times she was a jockey clad in colorful silks and Mrs. Speight was the announcer, rousing the crowd to an excited roar as Charlotte urged her horse toward the finish line without ever raising her whip.
Mrs. Speight would have made a great doctor, Charlotte thought as she wheeled her Malibu onto the Abram H. parking lot. It was Mrs. Speight who showed her how to hold a baby, how to burp it and bathe it, how to use the rhythm of her own breath to calm it down.
Sharps ate pie like a pig. All that effort that he put into appearing slick and smooth fell by the wayside as soon as someone slid something sweet under his nose.
Sitting beside him in the Eldorado, idling in the alley behind Artinces Noel’s house, PeeWee wished he had discovered Sharps’s weak spot earlier. He’d have him eating out of his hand by now instead of scooping cold lemon meringue from the pan and stuffing it into his mouth like a Third World toddler in a starving-orphan commercial. He could barely look at him, and the sound of his munching was equally annoying.
At least the preoccupation with pie encouraged Sharps to ease up on all the lecturing. PeeWee took advantage of Sharps’s distraction to take out the ring and enjoy its weight in the palm of his hand. He was so sick of Sharps constantly criticizing him that he had half a mind to just put on the ring and beat the piss out of his needle-nosed ass right there in the alley. But he knew he had to wait. It wouldn’t be smart to lose his cool on the edge of their big score. But once they’d pulled it off and divvied up the loot, pow! He’d become one with the ring, and the whole North Side—maybe the whole world—would know his power.
A car pulled up behind them and flas
hed its headlights. After spotting it in the rearview mirror, Sharps put down the pie and wiped his hands delicately on a silk pocket square. He pulled his toothpick from his breast pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and glanced at his watch. “’Bout fuckin’ time,” he said.
The emergency room was strangely quiet. Passing through, Charlotte took note of a handful of patients, none of whom seemed to be suffering from anything more traumatic than an aching stomach or a sprained ankle. She noted the relative calm with faint surprise, half-expecting to see the entrance clogged with screaming ambulances, rushing paramedics, and frantic people. Despite its notoriously inadequate budget, Abram Higgins was the best in the city when it came to handling gunshot and stab wounds. The staff had become so proficient, the joke went, because North Siders gave them more than enough practice. Charlotte had anticipated seeing a few stragglers from the Afro Day event, revelers whose enthusiasm for beer and excitement had exceeded their capacity for self-control. But as she left the emergency ward and walked the long corridor leading to the well-baby center, all was hushed and as close to serene as a building full of sick and injured people could be.
Signing in, she spoke quietly to the familiar nurses on duty. At first she thought she might read to the babies (another Dr. Noel innovation: regularly scheduled reading sessions during which soft-voiced volunteers introduced the newborns to the world of books), but decided instead to take a seat in front of the glass and simply watch them sleep.
The hallowed peace of the well-baby center always calmed her nerves. When she first came there as a volunteer, she attributed its unruffled character to the personality of its founder and the staff of nurses and young doctors that Dr. Noel had personally trained. She realized now that the ambient tranquility could just as easily have derived from the sacred purpose of the place. She learned about sacred purpose in Introduction to World Cultures, a popular class taught at River Valley by Dr. Bernard Murray.
Charlotte had yet to come up with a word comprehensive enough to describe Dr. Murray without help from other words; at semester’s end the leading candidates had been dapper and fastidious. He delivered his lectures, supplemented by anecdotes of his far-flung wanderings, with the force and drama of fervent sermons as he urged his students to uncover the “numinous connection” that bound everything on earth. His pupils often remarked that his classroom orations put Chaplain Stuckey’s pulpit mumblings to shame. Chapel attendance was no longer mandatory, but enough students attended on Sundays to testify that they were ponderous snore-fests. Stuckey, who appeared to be half-asleep himself, made little effort to improve. Indeed, they swore, the only thing longer than his sermons was his nostril hair, which joined his robust mustache in a riotous, barbed tangle above his upper lip. Not so with clean-shaven Dr. Murray. He punctuated his lectures with jokes (occasionally raunchy), animated gestures, and more voices than a ventriloquist. In his version of the fire-and-brimstone cosmos, Illumination was the heavenly, sought-for goal; Ignorance, more punishing than the fiery pits of hell, was inexcusable and to be avoided at the price of one’s soul.
Dr. Murray’s slides offered visual proof of his epic globetrotting. There he was at the Great Pyramids, his spectacles gleaming, his straw boater resting perfectly on his pomaded head, a pipe clenched between teeth that rivaled Teddy Roosevelt’s. There he was outside the Globe Theater in London in his immaculate herringbone three-piece, his bow tie flawlessly knotted.
He was a professed skeptic, an outlook that many of his colleagues saw as detrimental to his character—colleagues whose attachment to what Murray called “conventional belief systems” remained steady even as the rebellious philosophies of the Black Power movement challenged the prayerful civil rights movement. Still, he claimed to have an open mind (an acknowledgement that Charlotte appreciated, since she was still figuring things out) and was often at his most eloquent when describing various religious sites that he had visited. He spoke patiently of civilizations that spent centuries erecting shrines to a distant, bearded god who busied himself with watching over sparrows and counting hairs on human heads while wars devoured children and earthquakes swallowed cities whole. He was even more tolerant of cultures whose gods were half-human, half-animal hybrids and whose scriptures told of permeable boundaries between the living and the dead. Regardless of spiritual practice, he said, in temples and cathedrals he felt a Something that he couldn’t describe, a rhythm or power that defied language. The real mystery, he argued, was not in humanity’s compulsion to properly describe it; rather, it was in why we felt compelled to describe it in the first place, instead of just letting it be.
Listening to him, Charlotte thought she knew what he meant. She felt that mysterious Something herself whenever she came to see the babies. Sure, they were helpless. They couldn’t feed themselves. They couldn’t talk. They had to lie in their own waste until someone handled it for them. And yet, at the same time, they were emissaries from a celestial otherworld, the most perfect beings on earth. To harness science and compassion in their service, as Artinces had done, was, to Charlotte, the ultimate incarnation of the Holy. Reveling in it, she had determined to be a healer.
When Charlotte first got to River Valley, she learned that the science part of her calling was heavier duty than she had previously realized. Her high-school teachers had been diligent but they frequently worked with outdated material. She was dismayed to find that her science textbooks had been, on average, about 12 years old.
“Surprise, surprise,” Percy said when she whined to him about it. “That’s the essence of Negro education: catching up. And you thought ‘separate but equal’ was all in the past.”
Unlike Percy, Charlotte had to knuckle down and actually study. As her Organic Chemistry final loomed, she was forced to acknowledge that she’d neglected her books all spring. She hadn’t spent that much time with Percy; he was more off than on at that point. But that didn’t stop her from sitting at the Soldiers or taking solitary moonlit strolls under the constellations that he had pointed out to her.
Finally, Laurie Jo pulled her coat. “I’m going to talk to you like I talk to my own sister,” she said as they sat in their dorm room. “You’re really young. There’s a lot of men in this world. Chances are you haven’t run into the one for you just yet. The fellows you’ve known are probably just…dress rehearsals. Right now, your soulmate is somewhere else doing something important to make him become the man you need him to be. He might be in Michigan. Or California. Or Bangladesh.”
Charlotte scratched the side of her nose. “Where?”
“I just like saying Bangladesh. Blame it on World Cultures class.”
Laurie Jo made her point so persuasively that Charlotte chose to sit out the opening hours of Indestructible Black Consciousness Day and sequester herself in a cubicle at the library. Black pride could wait, Laurie Jo said. Organic Chemistry could not.
Charlotte strolled across the quad at midmorning, Bromo Seltzer bubbling in her stomach and a Lifesaver melting on her tongue. All around her, fraternity brothers and lettermen were busy transforming the dew-drizzled space into party central. They aligned barbecue grills and stoked them with charcoal, and set up a horseshoe pitch and a volleyball net. Sorority sisters and cheerleaders spread colorful blankets on the grass. On the second story of the education building, massive stereo speakers supported the raised windows. A banner with “IBC” emblazoned on it stretched across the front of the redbrick science building.
In previous years, the event had been christened Brotherhood Day. An all-day picnic in celebration of humanity’s God-blessed kinship, it began with a psalm and ended with a benediction, all under the paternal guidance of the surrounding town’s civic fathers. Charlotte’s freshman year marked a change in theme that coincided with a change in student leadership. The student council president, sporting a sky-high natural and wearing a polished bone pendant dangling from a rawhide cord, became the newly anointed chairman of the board. The treasurer remained treasurer. The recording secreta
ry became minister of information. The newly created post of minister of defense had so far remained vacant. In a dramatic gesture of strength, the new council struck down Brotherhood in favor of Indestructible Black Consciousness, launched without benefit of administration approval or funding.
The leaders laughed off rumors that River Valley’s president, widely derided as a lackey of the white power structure, planned to intervene. “They think Jackson State’s got us scared,” the chairman had declared at a rally on the quad. “But it’s just made us more determined.”
“More determined to have a picnic,” Percy said when told about the rally. “So that’s what they mean when they talk about speaking truth to power.”
The students at Jackson State had been demonstrating against the war, a far more noble cause, in Percy’s opinion. Police troopers weren’t so impressed. They fired on the assembly, killing two and wounding twelve. Students at River Valley held a candlelight vigil in support, amid a growing sentiment that peaceful gatherings of that sort were beginning to outlive their usefulness. The administration had stood pat, believing that students would soon go home for summer break and return the next fall with cooler heads. Meanwhile, less than two weeks after Jackson State, they were preparing to barbecue.
“Kumbaya,” the traditional overture of Brotherhood Day, had been emphatically dismissed. As Charlotte mounted the stairs to the library, Nina Simone was wailing across the quad, threatening to break down and let it all out.
Late afternoon and the stubborn sourness in her mouth roused her from a brief nap. She raised her head from her table and slid her tongue over her crusty teeth. Fishing coins from her purse, she headed to the vending machine in search of a 7UP. She’d nibbled on toast for breakfast and pecked at crackers for lunch, but so far none of her methods had done a thing to reduce the bile insistently brewing in her belly. The sickness stemmed from a late-night encounter outside her dorm room.
