Posie nudged Verdi to tell her to look at Sage. “Told you that chile got plenty of sense,” she whispered to Verdi. “I do believe she’s gonna talk soon too. Keep working with her, Verdi Mae, I see the improvement just in the short time you been principal at her school.”
“Oh Auntie, you know I will now,” Verdi said as she went to help Sage with the briefcase, asking herself why was she back over here again this Friday anyhow; told herself that it was for the grilled salmon Kitt did on Fridays; wouldn’t admit to herself that it was for conversation about Johnson, so many questions she had about him: Had he married yet? Children? What about his eyes, did they still get that stony intenseness that used to move rapids through her?
“And how are things going on your job anyhow?” Posie sliced into Verdi’s stream of denial about why she was here. “You feeling more settled in with your new position?” she asked as Verdi shook off her taupe-colored raincoat and sank into the couch, and a more satisfied version of herself emerged like always when she got here, got to the easy unencumbered feel of this green corduroy couch, the peach flowered wallpaper that Kitt had hung herself, the lacy curtains she’d pleated from the tablecloths Verdi had brought her back from Mexico, the spotless coffee table, the sense of order here, not strained and calculated, but free-forming like a cha-cha that’s always on beat even when the feet misstepped.
“Gorgeous suit, Verdi Mae,” Posie said, before Verdi could answer. “You really looking the part of a principal in that navy silk suit, I tell you that much. ’Course I know it’s got to be hard making the switch like you did from teaching to leading. I remember when I was working at the dry cleaners, before my lungs started acting up and I had to go out on disability, and I was made the lead presser, and let me tell you, Verdi Mae, those other girls I’d been promoted over really showed their behinds, some used to be my friends too. Lord yes, went as far as accusing me of sleeping with the boss. People surely change up on you when you become the one in charge, even try to make you doubt your own fitness for the job you were selected to do.”
Verdi’s mouth dropped as she sat on the couch stroking Sage’s braids. It was almost as if her aunt knew the tussle she’d been having with herself over her new position. Was about to tell Posie about the blowup she felt she was building toward with her vice principal and her clique of supporters when the phone rang and Posie went to answer it, had her back to Verdi as she laughed out loud and walked into the dining room with the phone. And Verdi had the thought what if it was Johnson on the phone? She shook the thought, felt like she was betraying Rowe to think about Johnson, especially when her thoughts boarded a runaway train and she was seeing them together all sweaty and fused. Right now she focused on Sage instead, who had stretched herself out on the well-padded Berber carpet and was rolling her fat barrel-shaped crayons over construction paper. Verdi got down on the floor with Sage and said each color as Sage picked them up, scarlet, she said about the red one, and Sage held it up again, and Verdi laughed at herself, said it’s red, baby. Red. Though it was scarlet. The same color as the two dozen velvety roses Rowe had brought home last night apologizing for running his finger along Verdi’s vein like he’d done. He was so sincere and seemed almost shy, certainly embarrassed, and Verdi had melted, that softness pouring off of him reminded her why she had such great affection for him anyhow. She almost admitted then that she’d lied, that she wasn’t getting a manicure and a massage. She didn’t admit it though. Did resolve within herself to be honest from here on out when she spent time with Kitt. Told herself that she would call Rowe as soon as her auntie got off of the phone to tell him where she was. Resolved to pluck Johnson from her fantasies. Convinced herself now that she was here for a taste of Kitt’s grilled salmon.
Verdi was always able to discern Rowe’s softness. Even back when he taught her history. She’d gotten in the habit of sitting up front in the large lecture halls so that she wasn’t looking on the backs of the heads of the continuous tides of white people that sometimes made her feel as though they might rise up in a great wave and have her flailing around struggling not to drown, and the feeling was so intense that sometimes her chest would even go tight and from then on she was severely distracted from the lectures, so she was always right there within two feet of Rowe’s lectern for his course called the Crisis of the Union. And this one day as he held the lecture hall in his grip as he went around the room and pointed at people and in his bellowing voice asked them questions in order to determine whether they’d been listening, whether they’d done the readings, and he pointed at Verdi then, though his voice lost a degree of its menace: “According to the slave narratives, what was one of the most compelling psychological weapons used against the African male?”
Verdi looked first at her desk as her heart pounded in her ears, then at him, saw the loosening in the muscles of his jaw that were usually clamped so tightly together. “The emasculation factor,” she said, and after she’d spoken realized that she’d whispered.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” he asked as he moved from behind the lectern until he was standing almost directly over Verdi.
“Well.” She cleared her throat, forced herself to speak up, to look directly at him as she spoke. “It’s not stated explicitly in the narratives we’ve read, and is also conjecture on my part, but even worse than what is stated explicitly, the male slave being forced to watch other slaves brutalized, to take part in the brutalization, is the far more devastating weapon of the African male lying down with his wife knowing that she’s been with another man, albeit in a forced way, and that the other man is also his captor and has rendered him powerless to do anything about it. The fact that descriptions of those kinds of feelings are absent at least in our assigned readings leads me to believe that it was too devastating to even verbalize.”
He was quiet when she finished. Just stood there looking at her as if he’d been hypnotized, his jaw so slack now his mouth hung open slightly. “That was a courageous conjecture,” he said finally as he walked back to the lectern. “More of you should sit up here in the front row and absorb similar kinds of insights.”
He stopped Verdi on the way out, told her again how much he appreciated her comments. “Forgive me if I’m crossing the line,” he said as he folded papers into his briefcase. “But my wife’s nephew is visiting this weekend, a freshman also—Moorehouse man, but we won’t hold that against him.” They both laughed as he held the door open for Verdi to walk through. “Anyhow Penda and I were thinking about who we could invite over for dinner this Saturday, and Penda was so dazzled by your performance in her intro-to-ed-psych course last semester that we both said your name at the same time. But, Verdi, please don’t even look at this as a blind-date situation or anything that approaches that, and you can even think about it, let me know after class on Wednesday.”
And Verdi was thinking that it sounded benign enough, and she liked his wife Penda. And they were outside now, walking down the steps from College Hall, and there was an antiwar demonstration going on down on the grass with placards waving and people talking through megaphones. And Verdi easily picked out Johnson in the mostly white assemblage, and she knew how ambivalent he was about these demonstrations, having lost a brother who’d willingly enlisted. And she could see his distress all the way from where she was by the way he had his hand propped in his chin. Knew that he needed her. That he’d feel rejected if she spent Saturday evening with some Moorehouse man. She turned back to Rowe and smiled. Said, “I’m sorry, I have to decline, I already have plans for this weekend. But, well, I guess tell your nephew that I said hello anyhow.”
She shook the look of disappointment that came up in Rowe’s eyes as she ran down the steps to get to Johnson, to put her head against his chest, to warm his chest. It was chilly out here and he had his jacket wide open. Even as Rowe clenched his jaws again and watched her running, knew who she was running to. Thought it was such a waste.
But no matter what Rowe or anybody else thought, Verdi a
nd Johnson had taken on glows of two people fiercely in love as they became increasingly like interlocking wood carvings, where one protruded the other dimpled to better accommodate the fusion. Johnson was spending so little time in his own dorm with Tower and the rest, and so much time in Verdi’s room that the night security just let him sign himself in without making him ring her room first. Verdi’s next-door neighbor, Barb, joked that Johnson should be allowed to attend the hall meetings since for all intents and purposes he lived there too. Verdi’s best friend Cheryl started seeing Johnson’s roommate, Tower, she said, just so that she might maybe catch a glimpse of Verdi if she happened to come by. They accepted the comments breezily though. Laughed, waved good-bye, closed the door to Verdi’s room where they had become accustomed to sharing one scrumptious meal after the next complete with candles and linen napkins. Sometimes they mmmed and aahed over spaghetti and meatballs or livers smothered in onions carefully prepared by Johnson’s mother and packaged and contained in her slightly chipped china for Johnson to transport on the bus ride down. Sometimes they languished over a turkey-and-stuffing plate piled high sent from Kitt and hand-delivered by Posie’s latest beau. Sometimes they picked at a bowl of chili con carne pilfered from the dining hall hidden under one of Verdi’s oversized textbooks. Sometimes Johnson hopped a bus to Whitaker’s in Southwest Philly and brought back hoagies so substantial that the mayo and onions and cheeses and meats soaked perfectly circled holes through the brown paper bags. But their real appetites transcended even these palatable treasures; it was each other that they hungered for most. Craved. As if they satisfied in each other intense yearnings due to some elemental lacking in themselves.
For Verdi it was the knowledge of things edgy: the marijuana cigarettes Johnson had taught her how to smoke, a trip into West Philly to a card house and speakeasy posing as a dimly lit cellar party just before it was raided; a midnight snack where she and Johnson wolfed down hot buttered yeast rolls at Broadway on Fifty-second Street to quench reefer-induced pangs of famish where Verdi was mesmerized by the late-night mix of laughter and chatter coming from whores and cops and young boys trying to be old in outdated processed hair, and old men trying to be young boys in Afro wigs and gold medallion chains, and middle-aged choir members who’d just left a worship-and-praise service, and the drunks trying to keep some coffee down, and the legitimate club goers just outside Broadway’s window scrambling like carpenter ants before a storm in and out of red-and-blue-aired establishments on the Strip. It was all so thrilling to Verdi as Johnson exposed her to pieces of living she’d never before imagined. She felt herself becoming smarter, sharper, growing angles where she’d typically been round; muscle where she’d been flaccid and soft. She felt leaner and at the same time expansive, fit, as if she were not only working out academically, intellectually with the intense smorgasbord of university requirements, but also being acculturated in the opposite direction, developing that tiny dot of herself that she’d never really nourished that longed to straddle the line between comfort and security, danger and intrigue in the dichotomy of good girl–bad girl, scholar–street-smart. Sometimes she even yearned to cross the line and wade for a minute in the treacherous and forbidden muddied rapids Johnson was introducing her to.
Verdi and Johnson crisscrossed each other in their awakenings to leanings that were opposite their original selves because Johnson was beginning to feel the nudges of transformation as well. He was going to church regularly, having been introduced to a congregation not far from the campus where an old classmate of Verdi’s father was the pastor, and though he complained to Verdi about so-called middle-class Baptists, “They’re extremely Uncle Tomish when it comes to the struggle,” he’d say. “No offense to your father, baby, but those church people have power out to way wide with their economic base, and it’s just not being funneled in any collective and therefore effective way.” Yet, on the Sunday mornings when she might have otherwise overslept because they’d been up half the night playing pinocle with Tower and Cheryl and smoking “the killer,” as they called the really potent weed, and drinking wine and sometimes even graduating to vodka and orange juice, he’d still kiss her awake and put on a borrowed sport jacket over his jeans, and feed her coffee so that she could make the six-block walk to the church, and once there he’d even occasionally clap during the choir’s rendition of a particularly energetic and rousing tune. He actually trod inside of a Bonwit Teller store when Verdi went to buy a birthday gift for shipping down home to her mother—and Bonwit Teller had always symbolized gross opulence to him where the socially negligent would pay three dollars for a cotton handkerchief and scoff at being levied a proportional amount to fund the war on poverty—but he strode through the marble-tiled floors of that place and even stuck his Afro pick in his jeans pocket instead of as an ornament growing out of the center of his hair; he kissed her behind the ear when he did, whispered, “This is only for you, baby, might keep the security guards in their three-piece suits—as if I don’t know they’re rent-a-cops—from walking on our heels while you try to shop for your moms.” He experienced theater for the first time with Verdi under his arm. Sat through the Philadelphia Orchestra on tickets sent by Verdi’s piano teacher from back home and never admitted to Tower and Moose and the rest how the violin concerto stirred something someplace so deeply planted under his layers and layers of city-street-poor, revolution-now affect that it frightened him at first. Desisted admitting to any kind of transformation when his dorm mates challenged him over spit-tinged marijuana cigarettes. “You getting so establishment we got bets on how long before you strut through here in a Brooks Brothers pinstripe and leather-soled oxfords,” they teased.
Where Verdi would openly express the thrill of all that she was experiencing; she would beam and laugh and hop excitedly and beg, “Oh please, Johnson, let’s go off campus and cop some really good weed and then trip off of the drunks on Fortieth Street,” Johnson could not. Felt that indication of any acquiescence on his part meant that he was selling out.
“I’m nobody’s Tom,” he’d remind Verdi even as he accompanied her to tea at the Mount Airy home of the descendant of the founder of the social club that at her mother’s insistence had been a part of her growing-up years. Had to pretend that his entry into Verdi’s world was solely for her, that it was even painful for him to take certain steps. Would maintain to his boys as they guzzled cheap wine and told pussy-chasing stories that he was forced to accompany his lady to the Nutcracker suite or else she’d hold out on him at night, then he’d go on to chronicle how Verdi would let him curl up in her tiny dorm bed all next to her and as soon as his manhood went hard as granite and swelled and throbbed she’d remind him how he’d refused to participate in what he called some wannabe activity and then she’d close up tighter than a clam protecting a gleaming oversized pearl. “Do you know how that shit feels,” he’d say, “like hey, man, just put me on ice in a freezer someplace so I’ll go numb because that laying up hard all night next to a warm soft body is some painful shit.”
He’d get their concurrence then, their sympathy, though of course he lied. Verdi was perpetually hot and brimming, it seemed, just oozing sexuality once they got to her room and locked the door and dimmed the lights and got some Stylistics going on the record player. Lately she had even started making the first moves, showing her nakedness unabashedly, jostling to be on top, wanting to try things, always always wanting to try something new. He sometimes thought that it was a good thing that she was so straitlaced, that she might otherwise suffer from nymphomania if not for those cultural and religious controls that were so glued to her sense of who, what she was. So he was more than grateful for that shy and blushing churchy side to her because it kept him from worrying about some other brother tapping on her door when he wasn’t around—especially since she didn’t have a roommate and the brothers always went after the ones with the single rooms. All he’d have to do was remember her manners, her politeness, her ability to say something like, “The
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” as quickly as he was prone to take the Lord’s name in vain and the thought would relax him, confirm in his mind that Verdi wasn’t some temptress just passing the time with him until the next pair of pants came through, that it wasn’t just a nonspecific maleness that she responded to when they were together and she turned to cream, it was him, Johnson, who aroused her, who she adored. She was his lady, his African-American queen, and he’d topple mountains to keep her so.
Except that he couldn’t topple the mountain of his sadness that had slithered through him so quietly without even calling attention to itself, until it was so deep on the inside that he couldn’t even tell from where it emanated, couldn’t single out an event, or remark, or thought, or memory—no cause, it seemed, to the depression that would start with a pounding fist from the inside of his chest and then billow until even the air that surrounded him accumulated itself into a bleakness that he could barely see through. It was worse during the summer. And this summer of ’72 was the worst of all because Verdi wasn’t here to give him relief.
Though she’d pleaded to be allowed to stay in Philly just as she did every break, her parents said no. Her father had secured her a paid summer position in Maynard Jackson’s campaign for mayor, so staying in Philly this summer wasn’t negotiable, not at all. And even though she’d managed to finagle two weekends back in June, and one in July, the stretches without her, without being able to draw on her infectious good spirit, her intact benevolent philosophy that believed that through it all everything would work out fine, made Johnson feel the way he imagined a broken-down racehorse must feel just before it was shot.
Blues Dancing Page 10
