The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  I heard my dead sister’s voice in my ear.

  Now, what did you learn from this experience? Lydia asked.

  “I learned never to trust some fucking pictures in a university mail-out.”

  That’s right, baby, she said.

  I held out my hand and pretended Lydia was there to give me five. Then I turned my palm down, this time on the Black-hand side.

  There were two linebackers living in the house across the street from me. Big, fine, pea-fed boys, their skin gleaming in the tank tops they wore. They walked slowly, as if it took effort to cart that much prettiness around. They were sophomores, both from Louisiana. Eddie Thibideaux was Creole and shy with dark-blond hair. He had better manners than Mike Corban, a brown-skinned honey who gave me hound-dog glances, saying he liked him some older women. But the day I moved in, they rushed to help me unpack the car, though it was July in full blast. As a gesture of gratitude for their help moving, I cut up and fried a whole chicken and baked biscuits for Eddie and Mike, which they dispatched in around ten minutes.

  The next week, Mike showed up begging for a meal. Eddie peeked from their doorway, hopeful, and then disappointed, as his teammate ran a slew-footed jog across the street, shaking his head. But they were generous, too: Mike would knock on my door, inviting me over to share their five large meat lover’s pizzas, just delivered.

  “Have some, Miss Ailey? It’s gone be real, real good.”

  I would wave him out of the doorway as he reassured me that I didn’t need to be on no diet. I was thick and super fine in the right places.

  Other than athletes, there were very few brothers on campus, and even fewer in the graduate programs. Scooter Park was tall and slim, and other than my neighbors, he was the finest Black man walking around North Carolina Regents University. A lean runner type, he concealed whatever muscles he had under his rotation of business suits. My first semester in Acorn, we met at the annual Black graduate students’ association reception, two weeks after classes had begun.

  I almost hadn’t gone to the reception: my social awkwardness had returned with a vengeance, along with my homesickness. That year, there was a heat wave in North Carolina, and each morning I urged myself to get out of bed and face the day. Telling myself my ancestors had been through worse summers than this, and I should get up and take a shower, with my twenty-first-century, lazy self. I’d turn the water to lukewarm, just enough to clean the funk off, because hot would make me sleepy. Or make me a coward.

  The night of the Black graduate reception, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, chanting self-affirming mantras at my reflection. I could survive without my family and my college roommates, the only non-kin girlfriends I’d ever had. I was twenty-eight years old and a grown-ass woman. And look how captivating I was in my red linen dress (with girdle underneath) and Italian leather pumps (that I’d bought on sale). My courage lasted about twenty minutes, around the time I drove up to the multicultural center. I made the mistake of using the wrong entrance and ended up right behind the refreshments table. Worse, when I entered the room, I forgot to catch the door, and it shut with a loud bang.

  Dr. Charles Whitcomb, associate graduate dean and full professor of history, was in the middle of his remarks, and everyone looked back at me, glaring. Then someone else arrived, using the same entrance, but I feigned concentration as Dr. Whitcomb told our gathering that we were “the future of the African American race,” even when I felt a tap on the shoulder. At the second tap, I turned around and a tall brother leaned down.

  “Hi, I’m Scooter Park.”

  Small wisps of warm air hit my cheek. The wing tips were shiny, the suit a lightweight gray, and the tie a nearly matching shade in silk. He was a darker version of Denzel Washington, his cheeks smooth-shaven. I felt myself stirring, even after I saw his wedding band, and while Dr. Whitcomb continued to give his racially uplifting remarks, Scooter and I whispered to each other. We played the “Which Negroes Do You Know?” game and found out his aunt and my father’s mother were in the same sorority. Like me, Scooter had attended a private high school, though his had been a boarding school in Massachusetts.

  We left after the last of the speeches, carefully closing the door so it wouldn’t slam behind us. Outside, it had settled into full darkness, and Scooter insisted on walking me to the car. He held on to the door handle and talked in a concise baritone, while I sat with my keys in the ignition.

  His family hadn’t forgiven him for eloping after college graduation, during his internship. Two years later, he’d turned down Wharton for business school at North Carolina Regents University, because his wife wanted a change of scenery. His family was sending him a generous monthly stipend, and he hoped they would come around to the marriage, because Rebecca’s family wasn’t going to accept him. Her parents hadn’t cared where she attended graduate school, or whether she eloped, but they were absolutely pissed she’d married a Black guy. Scooter’s family wasn’t too happy, either. His father had tried to roll with things, but his mother had held out hope that he’d marry a sister, even though his other girlfriends had been white, too.

  “What did Mom expect?” Scooter asked. “She sent me to Phillips Academy and Brown. There weren’t that many Black girls to date. And now what? Am I supposed to divorce Rebecca?”

  “I get it, brother,” I said. “You don’t have to convince me. I’m good.”

  We laughed, and I told him that after I turned down medical school, I’d needed a job, so I took one as a research assistant for one of my college professors, and I caught the historian’s bug. My mother had wanted me to reapply to medical school, but my father wouldn’t have minded. That is, if he hadn’t died.

  Scooter placed his hand on the edge of the car door. He told me he was sorry about my father. His face was open, so full of emotion, like Denzel Washington’s in the whipping scene in Glory, when that single tear had traveled down his cheek. It was the drop of water that had soaked every pair of Black woman’s panties in the United States of America. I raised a hand to put over Scooter’s, but let it fall away: I had to defuse this situation, before it went too far.

  “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Youngblood, did your mama really name you after a motorized toy? I’ve heard some strange handles before, but yours has to be the absolute worst.”

  Take that, you beautiful, married bastard.

  He only laughed, opening his mouth wide enough for me to see the pink of his throat.

  “No, woman. My mother did not name me Scooter. My name is Quincy. I am not a junior and I am not a third.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out a card, and wrote his phone number on the back and gave it to me. On the front, there was only his name: Quincy X. Park.

  I asked, did the X stand for Malcolm?

  He told me it most certainly did not.

  * * *

  No one had suggested graduate school to me—not the old man, and not my mother. I’d come to the decision of grad school on my own, after nineteen months of working for Dr. Oludara. I’d been so reluctant to reach into the bookshelves lining the walls of her second office. To explore the articles in the banker’s boxes I’d stacked in the office’s closet, but when I’d begun to dive into the materials, the stories of the people had spoken to me.

  No matter how dry the prose of the books and articles, I could see the people in my imagination. Their old-fashioned clothes of heavy wool, and boots that buttoned up. I poured voices into their mouths and rounded the words that might emerge. But they weren’t characters. They were real people. I couldn’t turn away from them. I didn’t even try, and frequently, Dr. Oludara told me I’d caught something she hadn’t seen in her reading. She’d stop by before it was time for me to leave for the day, sit down, and we would talk about her project. Many times, the building would empty, and it would be dark when I pulled up to Uncle Root’s house. He didn’t complain, though. He’d tell me he already had made himself a sandw
ich.

  It had been an early September day when I knocked on the door of Dr. Oludara’s main office, asking, did she have a second?

  “Ailey, I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to make this grant deadline. “

  “Oh, okay. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  She looked up from the computer screen. “Can you give me a couple hours? Hold that thought, all right? Don’t forget.”

  It took until the end of the day, because I had to drive to Milledgeville and mail off her fellowship application. I was afraid that she’d be gone by the time I returned, but she was still there. She had a while, she said, because she was not about to drive back to Atlanta into that afternoon traffic. I fidgeted, and she told me, don’t be afraid to speak my mind.

  “I’m a little nervous,” I said. “I feel kind of silly. Um . . . okay. Do you remember when you asked me what my dream was, a while back? And I said I didn’t have one? Well, I did, when I was a little girl. But I thought it was a stupid dream. And then my sister got in trouble, and my family was worried about her. And then she passed away, and then I guess I made a mess of everything.”

  “You seem fine to me, Ailey. A little long-winded, because I still don’t know what this is about.”

  When she smiled, I knew she was teasing.

  “I’m sorry. So . . . um . . . it’s like this. I want to be a history teacher, or maybe a history professor, you know, like you. And I was wondering, you know, if I applied to a graduate program in history, if you could write me a letter of recommendation. I wasn’t a history major, so I’d need to take some more undergraduate classes in the field, but Uncle Root told me he’d pay for those, and—”

  “Is that all? Ailey, I already have a draft of your letter of recommendation on my hard drive. Dr. Hargrace asked me a year ago, but when you never said anything, I didn’t want to be in your business.”

  “For real?”

  “Listen, sister. Do you think I kept you on because you were cheap? Ailey, you’re my fourth research assistant! Everybody kept quitting as soon as they saw that mess in the other office. But you just rolled up your sleeves and got to work! And then all those excellent notes you took on those research materials! You really are brilliant, Ailey. Surely you must know that.”

  “You think so? Oh, gosh. Oh, thank you so much.” I put my hand over my face. I didn’t want her to see me crying, but she tugged at my hand.

  “Bless your heart. Don’t cry, sweetie.”

  “You just don’t understand. I never thought I’d find something that made me feel this way. I’ve never been happy before in my whole entire life. I thought I never would be.”

  “Oh, sister, I understand completely! Why do you think I work at this school for peanuts? It’s so I can feel how you do right now.”

  I thought I was done crying, but another wave shook me. She stood up and hugged me around my shoulders. Tomorrow, we’d start to plan out which extra undergraduate classes I needed to take, but this evening, we were going to eat us some ribs. Lots of them, because we needed to celebrate.

  She had celebrated with me again when I’d been accepted to the graduate program at North Carolina Regents University. She’d run checks on every professor in my department, putting out their names on the Black historian grapevine. But she assured me I’d have no problem with her former Harvard classmate Dr. Charles Whitcomb, whom she called Chuck. He wasn’t just Black on the outside. He was a real brother, through and through.

  Then she’d warned me: just because I was a brilliant researcher didn’t mean I could easily acquire a doctorate in history. The next few years were going to be brutal. I’d be exhausted, existing on very little sleep. I’d be drinking coffee like it was water. Even with the minority fellowship I’d won, I’d be poor as a church mouse at a Devil worship convention. Most of all, I needed to get my mind right, because I’d be lonely: there never had been a Black doctoral candidate in history at my university. But I’d assured Dr. Oludara that I was ready for whatever came my way. I’d finally found my briar patch. My purpose in life, and she’d told me, I had her home number.

  * * *

  That night of the Black graduate reception, I didn’t tell Scooter that I already knew his wife, after a fashion. I’d been quiet when he talked about Rebecca, but I saw her at least once a week in the history department. Like me, she was a first-year student in the master’s program. We were in the same seminar class, Southern Reconstruction and the New South. Rebecca wouldn’t speak to me, but rather teased with an eye-slide: she’d lock eyes with me for a split second before altering her gaze and fixing it on some spot beyond me, as if I was no longer there. It was like a movement you might make after casual sex, but without the orgasm, or the hopefully free dinner beforehand.

  Our class met for three hours every Thursday, where Dr. William Petersen terrorized us Socratic-style. On the first day he told us, he would ask questions. We would answer. We would not raise our hands or interject with comments. He was like that mean fat man in The Paper Chase, only Dr. Petersen was from Mississippi.

  But I was ready for him, because the nights before his class, I wouldn’t sleep. I’d take reams of notes and memorize the order in which I’d written them, so I didn’t have to flip through the pages.

  “Miss Garfield?” he asked. “Was the Reconstruction era a failure or a success? You have three minutes. Make your case.”

  “Well, Dr. Petersen, that depends on who you ask. W. E. B. Du Bois believed that Reconstruction was a long game. But he makes a moral case that it was a failure because Blacks and whites did not join forces against the white ruling class. He was disappointed about the loss of enfranchisement, and the rise of Jim Crow made civil rights impossible, but ultimately, Du Bois was optimistic. Should I go on?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “If you ask C. Vann Woodward, it was not only a failure, it was a tragedy, and the tragic hero was the white male aristocrat, who had tried to preserve a dying way of life instead of accepting that death.”

  “I see you’ve read ahead.”

  I smiled and nodded my head modestly.

  “But you still haven’t answered, Miss Garfield. What do you think, personally? What is your opinion?”

  “I would have to agree with Du Bois. I think it was a balanced achievement for African Americans.”

  “Excellent, Miss Garfield! My goodness! Aren’t you surprisingly articulate?”

  He smiled at me, and my own smile froze. “Oh. Um . . . thank you so much, Dr. Petersen. That’s so wonderful of you to say.”

  * * *

  “You watch that Petersen cracker,” Uncle Root said.

  “Oh, he’s harmless,” I said. “He’s a liberal. A Marxist, too.”

  I wasn’t going to mention my professor’s “articulate” compliment. Uncle Root hadn’t wanted me to attend graduate school so far away. He’d told me, several universities in Georgia had fine programs. But I’d wanted to prove I could make it on my own.

  The old man snorted. “A liberal, Marxist cracker from Mississippi! There’s a phrase I never thought I’d hear. I believe I can die happy now.”

  “Uncle Root, please stop using that word.”

  “What word?”

  “The C word.”

  “I’m unsure what you mean, Ailey.”

  “‘Cracker.’ You’re being prejudiced.”

  “I am not. I simply have common sense. That’s why I call you every week.”

  “I thought you called because you loved me.”

  “I do, sugarfoot, and it’s because of my love that I’m telling you, I don’t care what that white man calls himself. A cracker from Mississippi can never be trusted.”

  Those initial weeks, I only read books and articles and wrote reviews of both. There was a lot of reading, though, more than I’d anticipated. I was taking the full load of graduate classes. With those three classes combined, I was required to read between three and five hundred pages a week. But I used the magic trick that Uncle Root had sho
wn me, when I’d been a research assistant. The old man had told me, reading scholarly articles wasn’t like reading a novel. There was no joy in the language, no delicious anticipation of lyricism. It wasn’t like reading original documents either, where you had to read everything and in order. For an article, I only needed to read the first and last paragraphs followed by the initial sentence of each remaining paragraph, writing down pertinent dates and facts as I went. Finally, I had to make sure to read the foot- or endnotes to the article and circle back, because those would point to important information in the text.

  I was disappointed that none of my three classes required visits to the Old South Collections, the archives at the university. That was what I had been looking forward to the most about the program, and within days, I telephoned Dr. Oludara. Did she want me to look through the Georgia plantation portfolios? Just to see what I could find on the weeping time auction that she was writing her book about?

  “My goodness, are you kidding me? Ailey, yes! But are you sure? Do you have time?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I need the practice.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Oh, it’s my pleasure, Dr. Oludara! Don’t you even worry about money.”

  But within a few days, a package from her showed up on my front porch. Inside, there was a check for fifty dollars and several copies of journal articles. When I saw the thick stack of brand-new legal pads in the package, I called her back, lecturing: do not return to that office supply store, under any circumstances.

  My three classes were on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons. Weekday mornings—Monday through Friday—I drank coffee and studied at Shug’s Soul Patrol, the only Black restaurant in town. At noon, I drove to campus and parked. If I had an afternoon class, I walked in one direction, to the history department. If not, I walked in the other direction to the Old South Collections, where I did research for Dr. Oludara. When I arrived, puffing from the stairs—the elevator was only for staff or patrons who were disabled—I waved at Mrs. Ransom, the head archive librarian. She fixed her glasses on her nose. Smiled in recognition. She handed me white cotton gloves, then the document request forms.