When he spoke about his first friend, he said in full knowledge of the sophistication and political passions of his audience: I’m sure you all can imagine how it might be for a young, friendless boy raised so close to his mama’s teat suddenly to find himself in the intimate company of a rough-and-tumble country Negro three full years older than him. From the first moment, I was in heaven, chasin’ after him in all his rambunctious pursuits with the fidelity of a Jack Russell puppy. He took me deep into the woods. We scrambled over rocks and splashed through streams, runnin’ headlong deeper into the woods than I’d ever been before, to way over the Negro side of town. He taught me how to bait a hook and, you know, I do not recall what we used for bait that day except that it was slimy and squished between my fingers so that I was disgusted and thrilled at the same time. We propped up our poles with rocks and lay back in the soft dirt of the riverbank and let the dappled light daze our eyes. Li’l Bokay fell asleep almost immediately, but I was too excited by the day’s events to do likewise and studied him instead.
He did not look at all like Big Bokay, his granddaddy, who, despite his name, had not been big since first the rheumatism then his only son’s death in the war got hold of him and bent him over. Big Bokay was a soft-spoken, genial man—at least he was with me and mine—with a full head of white, wiry hair and large, knobby hands. I never heard a harsh word nor so much as a sigh of resentment from that man. Big Bokay was the color of Mama’s coffee, which she liked sweet with plenty of milk, while Li’l Bokay was as pitch-black, tall, and beefy as he is today. Throughout our ramble in the woods, I felt like beanstalk Jack chasin’ the Giant. On close inspection, I noticed his hands were small, the fingers short, as were his feet. I thought that a wonder, given his size. I puzzled over how he managed to stand upright on those feet. He looked to me as if he should bobble over every time he tried. His hair fascinated me, as it was smacked down close to his head with brilliantine. If I squinted my eyes, it sparkled like a king’s crown in the sun.
When he woke up from his nap, Li’l Bokay declared he was bored with fishin’, nothin’ was bitin’ anyway, and why don’t we go steal horses instead. My eyes near popped from my head. Why? I asked. So’s we can ride ’em, was the response. I gulped down my anticipated guilt and asked: Then what do we do? Why, shoot. Return ’em, he said. What you think, chile? I’m gonna kidnap you and lead you in a life of crime? And the look on my face as I considered this uncontemplated possibility caused him to burst into loud, rolling laughter so infectious I rolled with laughter too, there on that summer day by the riverbank where the fish weren’t bitin’ and a boy just has to do somethin’ to amuse himself. All that afternoon we ran through the Negro side of town, stealin’ scrawny mules and bony drays, which meant hoppin’ fences and jumpin’ on the backs of grazing animals, the two of us on the same one, kickin’ its sides with our heels until the startled creatures trotted aimlessly through their pastures with us holdin’ on to raggedy mane and each other for dear life. It was the most exhilarating day of my young life. I was returned home dirty and stinking of animal, bursting with all the boyish wisdom Li’l Bokay had taught me that day. Mama, I rattled, do you know that a horse can see out the side of his head but not at all directly in front? And Li’l Bokay says this and Li’l Bokay says that.
Now, this conversation took place in the kitchen, where Big Bokay had deposited me at the end of the day. He and Li’l Bokay were lookin’ through the screen door, regardin’ my excitement with big smiles, and Mama nodded over my head to Big Bokay: Well, I guess today was a big success. Might as well do it again tomorrow, that ok with you, Li’l Bokay? Yessum. Then Mama told me to go wash up for dinner and I ran off to the bathroom, but just before I reached it I realized I’d not said good-bye to Li’l Bokay and that seemed rude, so I raced back to the kitchen in time to see Mama place two quarters into his small, black hand with its pink palm, and I understood Li’l Bokay was my hired companion. Hired. This stung me in a place I’d never been stung before, but I buried the sting right away, piled Mississippi mud right on top of it, buried it deep, because there was nothing I wanted more in the world than to spend the next day with Li’l Bokay, then the next, doin’ whatever he wanted to do. Which we did. Yes, Mombasa Cooper was my first friend and paid to be so. Only then, as I said, we all called him Li’l Bokay. I’m sure his mama still does today, despite his notoriety.
Jackson told this story often, as often as Mombasa, né Li’l Bokay, Cooper was in the news. Due to Jackson’s popularity, he traveled in a crowd, an entourage if you will, and there were always people fresh to the scene around him who hadn’t yet heard it. One afternoon, directly after “despite his notoriety,” a honeyed voice, husky and sweet, rang out from somewhere in the back of the room: Was he as angry back then as he is now?
A good question, Jackson asserted, leaning forward and craning his neck, looking for the source of that voice, which from its first syllable affected him in a startling way, prickling his skin, making the hair of his head lift. As he looked over the heads of his peers, they parted like the Red Sea to afford him an unobstructed view of the incredible creature to whom that indelible voice belonged. Instantly, his mouth dried and his throat constricted, making speech impossible for the moment. It’s doubtful Jackson understood his reaction as anything more than a spike of lust, if a particularly intense one. In later times, he came to comprehend that that day, in that café, while he was busy foolishly feeding his pride with the transitory adulation of those who could never hope to understand who he was or where he came from no matter how brilliantly Missy Fine Sassaport had educated him in the role of interlocutor, those who were too full of their own assumptions to even try to escape the provincialism which stained their opinions of what the South was and how it got that way, those for whom he wasted his breath, he had met his fate. He had met Stella Godwin.
There are few left who remember, but there was an odd sort of creature who sprang up in the nanosecond that ticked between the seminal movements of young intellectuals of the 1960s, between the beatniks and the hippies, a creature conceived in the smoke-hazed caverns of jazz and beat poetry, those black-clad cradles of generational incomprehension and rebellion, whose birth took place in the light, on the mountaintop, whose first scream was a howl not out of Ginsburg, not out of that anguish, neither of anger, whose first scream was a howl not out of Summer of Love orgasmic joy, not out of that chaos, neither of psychedelic daydream, but was rather a howl of grief. Grief, prescient and keen, for the good things of the old world that the new world worked so hard to obliterate. These were the creatures who listened to Mahler and not the Beatles, who admired the technique of Tintoretto more than the invention of Warhol, who read Jefferson not Mao, who were, by God, capitalists, whose mantra “change the system from within” was crushed between the nihilism of the worn-out and the exuberance of the self-indulgent. These were the true outsiders of their generation, these justice-hungry anachronisms, whose boundless pure energy was doomed to extinction by the time they could clamorously crawl, and Stella Godwin was their priestess. What’s more, she looked the part.
Stella: glittering ropes of flame red hair, broad, pale forehead, oval eyes of a brown so deep Jackson’s soul fell into them at once as if into a boundless well, plump, purple lips bowed at the center, a nose he knew instantly as the thin, long nose of a Jewish aristocrat, and that neck, ah, that neck impossibly long with its cluster of sweet freckles at the base, a neck made for tender bites. She wore a full-length belted trench coat with a tartan scarf and the neck, the head, that was all he saw at first. He had no knowledge yet of her full breasts and tiny waist, of the pert little rump from which grew thighs so slender they reminded him— once he did know them—of the stalks of irises they were that slim, that long, but the face, the hair, the neck popping up out of a mass of plaid were enough to inspire him to mute desire. He tried to elocute, but his throat remained clogged. He could not speak. He could only stare.
If it’s such a good question,
why don’t you try answering it, Stella Godwin stated more than asked.
He coughed so that he could articulate something, anything, lest she write him off as a dumb hick. Twice he coughed then found it necessary to cough again.
Yes. Yes. Alright. No, I wouldn’t call Li’l Bokay angry then, although he did have a temper.
The conversation took a turn to angry black men, to Malcolm X particularly, and Jackson was left running an internal dialogue with this woman he did not know, a dialogue about Li’l Bokay’s fiery spirit and Katherine Marie and Bubba Ray and Daddy, too, about what happened among them all. This was a story he never shared. Katherine Marie had made him swear by his mama’s blood he would never speak of her part in those matters. He’d not been sure even then if making that pact was honorable, but he’d kept her secret for three years anyway, no matter how he’d burned from time to time to let it all loose. For reasons he did not comprehend, he longed to relate all of it to this redheaded woman, this stranger who’d stolen his soul.
After minimal detective work, he discovered her name, where she was from, what she studied, where she lived. That is: Stella Godwin of Boston, a master’s candidate in social work at Wesleyan, taking a semester off to lobby for the ACLU in New Haven. Yet more smitten by what amounted to an exotic background according to Jackson’s lights, he arranged to run into her. After ten minutes of conversation, he was further sunk. Ten minutes of watching her lips move and he needed his mouth on hers, needed his hands on Stella Godwin’s flesh. It was not simply a desire: he would not be at rest until he had what he needed. His friends teased him about his initial failures with her. What happened to Errol Flynn? they said when he shaved his mustache after he heard she did not like hairy men. They laughed and hooted as young men do when one of theirs succumbs to feminine power, telling him he looked like shit, telling him he’d met his match: She was eating him alive. He knew they were not far wrong. All day long he thought of her and at night, when he could sleep at all, he dreamt of her mouth, her hands on him everywhere. He about pined away before she had mercy.
It took maximum efforts of enticement, including coauthoring her petitions, standing in frigid temperatures collecting signatures, and accompanying Stella to the State House to deliver them, hoping every minute no one back home would somehow find out and proceed to make his daddy’s life a misery. At last, he insinuated himself into her bed after a pursuit of five months and it was there, that first night they were home from the great march, their ears yet ringing with the good reverend’s dream, that he told her about that summer night when the lives of Bubba Ray and Katherine Marie and Li’l Bokay and himself collided, crashing into poor old Daddy along the way. He told her in stutters, with blushes, with tears, and with sobs as the release of such a heavy burden demands. Stella Godwin listened, silent, poker-faced, huddled on her side of the bed with her luscious knees up and a gaze of utter attention for every guilty word. Just after he was done telling his story, she told him: I think I love you, Jackson. I think I just this minute fell in love. Up ‘til now, I wasn’t really sure about you. I only slept with you because you’d been so relentless in chasing after me. I figured I ought to give anyone who wanted me quite that much a chance. But now, after hearing all that, I think I love you.
And she opened her legs and her arms and folded him up in there while he broke down again, collapsing into her in a flurry of fresh tears, tears not of remorse this time but of gratitude.
THREE
Fall, 1963
AFTER THAT NIGHT, THEY OFTEN fell asleep entangled, and in the morning they bothered each other again. Stella liked to sleep in a bit afterward. Jackson would shower alone, careful not to make too much noise. Tidied up and properly bid adieu, he’d hit the street to walk from her apartment to his first class, thinking of how much he loved her, the adorable Stella Godwin, how much he continued to want her all the time every day and night, how he loved listening to her talk, how he loved the way she listened, how he loved her passion for him and for the general welfare of every other sorry-assed inhabitant of the planet. He considered her the most sanctified woman he’d ever met while the toughest-minded, the sexiest. Her apartment was a good distance away from campus, but Jackson enjoyed the time it took to get there as it afforded him the opportunity to think luxuriously of her legs both open and closed, their muscles flexed and relaxed, of her breasts, and that red hair. As he neared the university, he might run into a classmate who wanted to talk about their reading for the morning’s lecture and, made bright and alive by love, he found himself expounding vigorously and insightfully on the lesson of the day. And he’d think: This is what Mama meant. A man needs a good woman’s love to thrive.
Although his primary education had begun disastrously, Jackson caught up with his fellows, and once he started surpassing them, he never stopped. When Stella, applauding the job he’d done drafting one of her appeals, asked him how he’d got so smart, he told her the truth.
I didn’t start out this way, I willed it. Until I was twelve, I thought I was slow, but looking back I think I was just bored. Then at twelve, I studied for my bar mitzvah. I knew very little a good Jewish boy should know by twelve years of age, I was half a heathen. I was the first boy in three generations of my family to be bar mitzvah, but the new rabbi over to the capital was on fire to get his flock consecrated, so it became the new fashion, and Mama was not one to be left behind where fashion was concerned. We didn’t have a synagogue in Guilford. Daddy’d take me over to Beth Israel in Jackson for my lessons. My teacher was their new rabbi, Perry Nussbaum, who was very kind to me, patient and praiseful, which was remarkable for him. He had a reputation in the town for being blunt and, well, rude as a Yankee interloper to tell the truth. He was born in Canada, after all. People tried to overlook his rougher edges on that account, though it wasn’t easy for them. Lord, no, it wasn’t at all. It got even harder once he started in with the Freedom Riders. But this was before all that.
Anyway, it was unusual for me to have masculine approval. I lapped it up. I nearly got religion I loved that man so. One day I could not get through my Hebrew lesson at all. Every time I opened my mouth I made a mistake. I suppose I’d been lazy about my homework. Afterward, Rabbi Nussbaum left me for my father to pick up, and when he walked away he sighed. I know, I know it was just a sigh, a mere audible inhalation and exhalation of breath, but the disappointment in it stuck me like a Roman spear. First I grieved his former high opinion of me. Then I got angry. What made me angry was myself, that I hadn’t studied. The level of my anger was unusually intense, which at that age was likely due to a hormonal surge. I recall I sat on the steps of Temple Beth Israel waiting for Daddy. He was running late, and I had plenty of time to pound the concrete with two fists until my skin was scraped raw. Right there, sitting on those steps, I made my first adult decision. I decided I was tired of being stupid. As a remedy, I was going to be smart. Then I simply willed my intelligence into being. Once enlivened, it took over.
Stella laughed and kissed him when he told her that story. Then she reminded him that smart as he was, she was smarter. It was true. It was another reason he loved her.
The day came in their romance when they discussed meeting the families. Stella’s family was closer, in Boston. They planned a weekend with them first. During spring break, they’d travel south and meet his family. As the Boston visit approached, each grew more anxious. You don’t know my people, Stella said. We ought to have a signal that means “I’m sorry” between us, then I don’t have to be saying it all weekend, every time they embarrass me. Or you. You think the crowd at Yale is bad? They’ll probably ask you if your family raped slaves. Jackson roared at that. She was so witty. He could not imagine she was serious about an old Boston family, philanthropists, factory owners, wielders of the means of production, the very thing that defeated the South. How could such a family make an inquiry that rude, that coarse?
On the trip to Boston, Stella squirmed in her seat, twisted her fingers constantly, s
ighed, frowned, making it impossible for Jackson to drive his Renault with anything approaching calm. Quit fiddling with your fingers, he said. Just breathe deep, in and out. Relax, for God’s sake. The air in this vehicle is positively charged, and I cannot focus on the road. Do you want me to pull over? Do you need to stop somewhere? Stella burst into tears. Alarmed, he pulled into the next rest stop.
What is it, sweetheart? What is it? He tried to wrap her in his arms, but she’d only have a few seconds of it, and then she stiffened and slid out of them, fending off his reluctance to let her go with her gloved hands. At her best or at her worst, Stella had to keep part of herself to herself, there was something that never gave in that woman, but at that particular emergence of her boundaries, Jackson could only think he’d done the wrong thing and did not know what the right thing was. It was to become a familiar perception.
Since she could not stop crying, she talked between sobs. Her family, she said, could not stand her. She was their rebel, the conscience they could not hide from, the avatar of their error, for which they despised her. Her mother once called her a demon seed. Her father claimed he loved her, but he was a terrible hypocrite. Her two elder brothers had gone into the family business and closed their eyes to everything that went on within it, husbanding their intellectual powers for writing letters to politicians and stockholders. They never took note of her even as a child. Now that she’d gone off on her own, she figured they’d happily forgotten she’d ever existed. To make matters worse, as she put it, they were ostensibly pious, attending synagogue regularly and frequently holding office there and in the town. Her rejection of observance embarrassed them. He might as well know it: They were as likely to welcome her on their arrival as toss her out on her ear. She didn’t know what had possessed her to agree to this visit. After he met them, she was certain he’d drop her on the spot.
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