Only the Strong

by Jabari Asim

  She’d stayed in the stacks until closing time before stumbling sleepily to Taplin Hall. Once she reached her room, she let her bag fall loudly at her feet as she reached into her pockets for her key. Sighs and murmurs beckoned. She turned and saw Tish and the round-bellied man devouring each other’s mouths. Tish’s back was against the wall. The man leaned heavily into her, locked into place by her long, sleek thigh. Tish whispered encouragement as he rubbed his face into her throat, sucked at the hollow between her breasts.

  Charlotte snapped forward and threw up, splattering the bottom of her door. The lovers paused and took in Charlotte’s mess. Stunned, she returned the stare. The man disengaged from Tish, his pinky ring flashing as he popped his pocket square with a flourish. Charlotte thought he was going to hand it to her but instead he raised it to his own glistening brow. Chuckling softly, he kissed Tish’s cheek with surprising delicacy, and walked past Charlotte to the end of the hallway, where he descended the stairs.

  Tish smirked at Charlotte while she buttoned her blouse. “What’s the matter?” she taunted. “Never seen how grown folks go at it?”

  Charlotte glared. Apparently one slap had not been enough. “How could you?”

  Tish took her time, getting her key out of her bag before replying. “How could I what?”

  “That’s sick,” Charlotte sputtered. “Something’s wrong with you. With both of you.”

  At last Tish caught her meaning. “Wait. You think because I call him Daddy that he’s—you silly little girl. He’s not my father. He’s my pastor.”

  Charlotte retched again. Still bent over, she braced herself by placing one hand against her door. She didn’t want to straighten up. Didn’t want to look at Tish.

  “Careful,” Tish warned. “You almost got my shoes.”

  Standing at the machine waiting for her Dixie cup to drop and fill with fizzy liquid, she became conscious of a vague chanting. She figured the frats were stomping the yard as part of the festivities on the quad. But what were they saying? It was only when she got to the window, when she looked out and saw the policemen lined up with their hands on their holsters, that she could finally make out the words, rumbling up from the ground like hints of disaster.

  “Jackson State!”

  “Jackson State!”

  Years later, some who claimed to be among the witnesses or, even more presumptuously, the activists, would swear that hundreds of cops, clad in riot gear and armed to the teeth, lost a bloody battle with an even larger gathering of fearless and fiercely committed students. In reality, less than two dozen semi-concerned officers kept watch over a roughly equal number of students. Acting on orders from the college president, the cops had come to shut the “illegal” picnic down.

  The student resisters had removed the IBC banner that had been hanging across the science building. They held it in front of their thin, ragged line as they chanted. Behind them, perhaps 60 students watched and shouted encouragement from the steps of the science building. From her perch in the library lounge, Charlotte could just make out the stern faces on the front line: fraternity leaders, a football player or two, and the chairman of the board.

  The chants grew louder. The policemen fidgeted. Out of nowhere, a stone sailed above the heads of the masses and struck an officer on the shoulder. He unsnapped his holster. The crowd chanted louder as a solitary figure ducked under the banner and approached the officers. Charlotte squinted, although it was entirely unnecessary. She knew that walk anywhere.

  In her literature class, the teacher had marveled over Robert Burns’s poem “To a Louse,” in which he wishes that humans had the gift “to see ourselves as others see us.” Charlotte hadn’t been impressed. She remembered thinking that she already knew how men saw her; their actions throughout her life had made that painfully clear. What was the value in adopting someone else’s perspective? In the end, what was to be gained? She insisted on her own point of view because doing otherwise would concede the possibility that she was just a member of the chorus in someone else’s play. It would lend credence to the suspicion that she was the spear carrier, the expendable crewman, the scapegoat scribbled into the script to absorb the main character’s pain. To take all the punishment and anguish so that the prima ballerina can emerge unscathed, tutu intact, all sparkles and twinkles and pink chiffon. But she was aware, so aware, of what any student in the frightened but unbending mass may have seen when he turned a curious head toward the library window: a small girl lost in clothes too big for her, nearly undone by fear.

  The glass was an annoying barrier, a teasing nuisance that illustrated the vast distance between her and the ground, the space she had to travel. She ran like she drove, to hell with it and devil may care, so the three flights of stairs flew by in a burst of adrenaline as she threw herself through the doors and over the grass toward the gathering storm. But there’s always someone faster, someone like Laurie Jo. She caught Charlotte in a matter of strides and wrapped her in her arms. She held tight while Charlotte kicked and screamed, a marginal player in the scene unfolding, far from the heat and glare of center stage. The spotlight, where Percy stood and gestured before the now-restless guns.

  The photo that would appear two days later in the campus newspaper would provide few clues beyond the elements that everyone knew. The students, the cops. Percy in between them with his arms outstretched.

  The crowd’s roar dipped to complete, unbelieving silence as Percy and the policeman in charge shook hands. The roar returned, a resurgent bellow of victory, as the cops executed a crisp about-face and walked away. “Percy! Percy!” became the crowd’s chant as the students mobbed their new champion. Their enthusiasm carried him to the upstairs reception area in the science building, where students had commandeered chairs, tables, and couches and transformed them into a makeshift lounge. Someone turned on a radio. Downstairs, platters of food and coolers of cold drinks found their way inside. Upstairs, Percy sat on a chair in the middle of it all. Students gathered around to await his word.

  “What did you say to them?” the chairman asked, admiration glowing on his eyes.

  “I recited some poetry,” Percy replied.

  “What?” The chairman’s disbelief went through the crowd like a wave, sparking murmurs and exclamations in its wake.

  “That’s right. Music isn’t the only art with charms to soothe the savage beast.”

  Percy stood on his chair and spread his arms as he had done on the quad.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  “That’s what you said?”

  “That’s it exactly,” Percy said, warming to his audience. He was nervous, shiny, electric. “And the sergeant said, ‘I like that. That was beautiful. Did you write that?’ I said no, that was Matthew Arnold. ‘Dover Beach.’ I told him our forefathers shed blood over important things like land and freedom. I said to him, do we really want to shed blood over barbecued ribs? He said ‘No, son, I guess not.’ Then he told his men to stand down.”

  The chairman shook his head. It was just crazy enough to be true. “You’re shittin’ me,” he said.

  “No, Brother,” Percy said, “I shit thee not.”

  The students erupted in laughter and applause. In the span of a few taut minutes, Percy had gone from the smartest (and perhaps the craziest) man on campus to the bravest.

  “Percy,” the chairman said above the clamor, “you should be our minister of defense. Our Huey.”

  “Yeah,” Percy agreed. “Because I’m a regular Ralph Bunche, baby. Now that’s what I call a mixed metaphor.”

 
; In the background, the radio hummed. Downstairs, a pair of frat boys, although exhausted by the day’s excitement, were dancing energetically with a couple of cheerleaders when a third brother strutted in. He had been as far from the policemen as humanly possible, but in the story he was already composing for future generations he had moved to the front of the line, close enough to spit on a pig’s polished badge.

  His brothers shouted in greeting, exchanging knowing nods over the heads of their dance partners. They had gotten into something harder than Pepsi or 7UP.

  Upstairs, Charlotte recalled Percy belittling the chairman earlier in the year for equating jazz with revolution. Too simplistic, Percy said. “It’s a cliché, self-parody even, to pretend to dig jazz and scream about black consciousness at the same time. To argue that jazz alone is the people’s music is like saying that suffering is the only ‘real’ black experience. If anybody contains multitudes, it’s us.”

  The chairman had glowered at Percy while he ranted. Now, in the radiance of Percy’s eccentric genius, he gazed at him like a love-struck fan. Percy blew Charlotte a kiss and she beamed, lightheaded and a little ashamed of herself for being so fretful. This was Percy, wasn’t it? At his best, couldn’t he do anything? Charlotte caught glimpses of his future in his golden glow: he’d get his PhD (with honors, of course), return to River Valley, and build a world-class philosophy department. In time he’d take over the College of Arts and Letters before ascending to the presidency. After a long and exemplary career and annual recognition as one of Ebony magazine’s 100 Most Influential Blacks, he’d retire to a life of pastoral splendor. On campus, a statue would go up in his honor, right next to the Soldiers.

  Though she adored every syllable that Percy spat (damn that Tish), she knew the events of the day would eventually wear him down. Soon he’d be parched and hoarse. She wanted to be the one to quench his thirst.

  She headed downstairs in search of a soda.

  “The cops are gone,” the frat boys needled their pal. “Good of you to come out from your hiding place.”

  “Too bad,” the newcomer said. “I had something for them.”

  Charlotte reached the first floor. She turned, looking for the coolers she’d seen lined up earlier. When she found them she marched directly to them, barely noticing the frolicking frat boys and their giggly dates.

  One of the dancing men howled like a wolf. “Nigger,” he said, “where were you when the shit was going down?”

  “I was getting this piece, fool. Not like I carry it around on me. Lock and load, like brother Huey says.” The newcomer pulled a pistol from his waistband. The others had seen it before.

  “Brother Huey, my ass.”

  “He means Huey the duck. Dewey and Louie’s brother.”

  “Fuck y’all.”

  “I think he was hiding under his bed, calling for his mama.”

  “I think he was on the toilet scared shitless.”

  Undeterred, the frat boy spun it on his finger, like the hero in a cowboy drama on TV. Gunsmoke. The Wild, Wild West.

  Charlotte heard their banter like white noise, the static between stations. She ignored the sideshow, eager to return to manic, magic Percy in the center ring. To jazz, Ralph Bunche, and “Dover Beach.”

  The first cooler was empty. Nothing inside but dissolving ice chips and brittle water.

  “Bet you can’t do that twice.”

  “Ha! That’s what his girlfriend said.”

  The frat fool went at it again. The second spin was wobblier than the first. He grabbed at the gun with his other hand.

  The second cooler held one can. It was on the bottom, leaning against the far corner. Charlotte bent over and pushed her hand into the icy melt. She plunged her face in after, and for a second she was a diver, leaving the world of heat and hubbub for a cool descent into the welcoming azure. She registered the sound of a shot as a distant underwater event, muffled, mysterious.

  She raised her head, the chill lingering on her face like a cold hand against her cheek. She shivered, laughing at her impulse until she turned and saw two of the frat boys staring wonderingly above their heads. She stood and approached them. The one holding the smoking pistol swayed fitfully. The other steadied himself with his hands on his hips. Next to them, the third frat brother stood openmouthed, an arm around each cheerleader.

  Charlotte followed their gaze to the small hole in the ceiling. To the red drop forming as it hung suspended before falling precipitously to the floor. Another drop followed, then a thin, steady stream. In the room above them, somebody screamed.

  She hurled herself toward the sound. Upstairs, she split the crowd like an arrow, not stopping until she reached Percy, sprawled on his back in front of his chair. She knelt beside him and took his hand. Although he was motionless, a nervous energy still surrounded him. He looked shiny, electric, unafraid. His eyes were aimed at the ceiling. But he knew it was Charlotte beside him. In the swirling background, she heard crying, prayers, calls for an ambulance.

  “Here comes trouble,” he said. His words gurgled, like a clogged drain.

  “Shh, don’t talk.”

  “You were right,” he said. “There’s no point in thinking about it all the time.”

  After the memorial service on campus and the burial in his hometown, Charlotte returned to Gateway City. She tucked her braid under her shirt, pulled her hat down. She took long walks and even longer drives. She swung from adolescent whimsy to downhearted blues, with long silences in between that left Artinces concerned and confused. She turned her collar against the intrusions of horny boys and curious neighbors. She carried books by W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke and stared at the pages in isolated corners of coffee shops and diners. Though the words often wiggled and darted on the page, she kept at it, intent upon doing anything but remembering. Forget became the closest thing to a prayer that she ever uttered. Forget. Until she could no longer hear Percy’s voice, his laughter. Until she couldn’t see his skin the color of lightly toasted bread. Until she was no longer drawn to the water. Until she no longer dreamed of boats. All summer long she had been telling herself she could do it. She’d forgotten worse things.

  No, that was a lie. Nothing had been as bad as this.

  One of the babies began to stir. Charlotte leaned forward and peered through the glass. It was a girl, clad in the hospital’s customary pink. Charlotte was tempted to hold her, to whisper in her ear. “His name was Percy Conway,” she wanted to say. “And he wasn’t a male type. He was a man.” She stopped herself. It would be unfair to curse an innocent baby as she had been cursed, to send her down a difficult path without ever knowing why she was burdened, without knowing that someone else’s sadness was dogging her steps.

  She had to tell someone. Why not Dr. N.? The whole story. Tell her that her tale about being at the library during the shooting was only partly true. Tell her she needed a break from school before she broke into pieces. Tell her that walking around pretending to be normal was the hardest—only—work she could do.

  She headed for the exit. As she left, she passed a man signing in. He wore a custom tailored suit and a hat rakishly tilted to one side.

  “My name’s Ananias Goode,” he said to the nurse. “I’m on the list.”

  Despite declaring war against memories, Charlotte felt helplessly drawn to the site of the old church when she pulled up to a stop sign next to its ruins. Little was left of the building except the steps; like the rest of the block, the former Good Samaritan had been reduced to rubble as part of a corporate development campaign. Where there had once stood a church sign welcoming worshippers to Christ, there now stood a placard announcing the imminent construction of Killark Light and Power Co. Only a single streetlamp stood near the sign, conceding everything beyond the steps to the darkness of night. The street, formerly a hub of commerce, was now a one-way road to somewhere better, bordered on one side by cyclone fencing and on the other by the crumbling skeletons of abandoned buildings. Charlotte knew that the s
tone steps, cracked but still sturdy, had been important to the lives of many other babies besides her.

  Charlotte was still looking at the steps when a car smacked violently into her Malibu’s rear end. The impact threw her against the steering wheel, forcing air from her lungs. She opened her door and stumbled out to assess the damage. Before she could take two steps, her rear window shattered.

  “That’s her,” someone shouted. “That’s the bitch!”

  “I said, would you like to hold a baby?”

  Goode blinked furiously. He had the foggy aspect of a man emerging from a dream. The nurse waited patiently.

  Goode smiled at her. “That’s okay, I’ll just look at them. It’s my first time.”

  “You sure? Well, why don’t you scrub in, just in case.”

  He grunted in protest but the nurse behaved as if she hadn’t heard him. Before he knew it, she had removed his hat and replaced it with a surgical cap. She helped him slip a gown over his suit, turned him toward the sink, and showed him how to scrub. Goode felt like he was an infant himself, the way she guided him with confident, practiced gestures.

  He took his post in front of the glass. The first time he had noticed Artinces Noel, she was standing in the very room into which he now peered. She was young, not long out of medical school. But she had looked comfortable with her authority, displaying an ease bolstered by principle and conscience. At the grand opening of the well-baby center, she posed for the Citizen photographer with one infant in her arms and four others arrayed on an exam table. When he saw the picture in the paper, Goode couldn’t help focusing on the doctor. He liked the arch of her eyebrows, the upright posture and pursed lips suggesting that under no circumstances would she ever fall for the okey-doke. She had the kind of regal, self-assured profile that belonged on a coin.

  Artinces had been after him for a while, urging him to visit the babies. “You’d be surprised how good it feels,” she said. So there he was, not sure what he was looking for but looking nonetheless.