by Kia Corthron
“What are you talkin about? Lon, what is your son talkin about? This generation!”
“Aw, he’s pullin your leg, sister.” The dinner repartee continues with Eliot typically and Dwight notably not participating.
After the meal, the little girls are racing wildly through the house, Liddie yelling in a futile effort to get them to settle down. Finally Eliot, ready for a breather himself, offers to take the children for a walk. Their mother bundles them up, then Eliot takes each twin by the hand. They chatter like chipmunks but he is patient, answering their questions when asked. Around the block and coming up Colored Street. On one decorated house, lights blink accompanied by a bell rendition of “The First Noel.” Several houses later a party is going on. Through the window he sees people dancing, drinking, happy. The festive music from here,
Stagger Lee shot Billy
Oh he shot that poor boy so bad
Till the bullet came through Billy and it broke the
bartender’s glass
Twenty minutes after the start of their stroll, Eliot and the girls are nearing the Campbell home, the children worn out, quieter. Walking by Miss Onnie’s, the new neighbor girls are playing in their yard.
“Hi!” They come running. “You all live nex door?”
“My mother and father do.”
“What’s your name?”
“Eliot. And this is Fiona and Felicia.” He doesn’t even try to identify which is which.
“I’m Alicia!”
“I’m Alexa!”
“I’m seven!”
“I’m eight!”
By the time Eliot opens his door with the twins, they are falling asleep standing up, and Claris is laying out their bedroll.
“Where’s Dwight?” Eliot asks his mother.
“Went on home.”
“It’s not even seven yet.”
“Said he didn’t feel well. I thought somethin. Way he got all quiet at dinner.”
In the living room, Uncle Rick chastises Mitch, “You went with her an her sister? You playin with fire, boy!”
“There’s punkin pie out there,” Claris tells her younger son. “An pineapple upside-down.”
“No thanks.”
“No to pineapple upside-down?”
“My stomach feels a little funny.”
Claris shakes her head. “I hope you an Dwight ain’t comin down with the same thing.”
Eliot walks out to the back porch.
“Eliot!”
It’s the neighbor children, still outside.
“Come see our dolls!”
He almost steps off the porch to oblige the request. Then it occurs to him that the children’s parents may wonder what the hell this grown man is doing, spying on them this morning and now entering their yard to talk to their little girls.
“I can see from here.”
“This is Kitten!” says Alexa.
“This is Cathy,” says Alicia, markedly less enthusiastic. Kitten is a white blond doll, and Cathy, identical, is Negro. When Eliot was a kid, the only kind of black doll he’d ever seen was Mammy. But perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, the Negro doll’s lips and nose as Anglo-Saxon as her white counterpart, her dark hair curly but not nappy.
“Looks like you girls had a nice Christmas.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” says Alexa, jumping around happily while alternately swinging and clutching her white doll. Alicia eyes her sister bitterly.
“Alexa’s oldest so she got the good one.” This segues to a bit of a tug-of-war over white Kitten, interrupted when their mother comes to the door, snapping at her daughters to stop fighting and come inside to go to bed. They rush in crying, and even with the door closed their sobs can still be heard a little, as Cathy the black doll lies alone out on the cold ground till morning.
5
It had started early in the week with about thirty, those who could not afford a television. As the days passed more came, many who did own a set but who felt a compulsion to be among others, a good two hundred Negroes now in the February evening cold, the northwest quadrant of Monument Circle, their eyes fixed on the televisions in the display window. The irony that they are standing outside a Woolworth’s in Indiana to watch history being made at a Woolworth’s in North Carolina is not lost on any of them.
On Monday, Ezell A. Blair Jr., Franklin Eugene McCain, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and David Leinhail Richmond, students from North Carolina A&T, walked into the Greensboro Woolworth’s and sat at the lunch counter. Seating had been reserved for whites while Negroes were expected to eat standing. The four young men were not welcome and they were not served, but they were not evicted and they did not move. The manager hoped the spectacle would be an isolated incident. On the contrary, the number of Negroes making the quiet protest had increased throughout the week. Today, Saturday the 6th, three hundred were sitting in, including young women and some A&T football players, the latter to provide an extra bulwark of resistance should anyone even consider forcing the expulsion of the group.
They had come upon the assembly independently. Andi had needed to run some domestic errand at the five-and-dime after work, Eliot and Will had had business in the nearby Marion County Courthouse, all distracted by what appeared to be a spontaneous gathering of Negroes in front of the department store just in time for the evening news. They had only noticed each other at the end of the broadcast. Every day since they had come together. They’d made no plan for the weekend, so Eliot is pleasantly surprised to glimpse both of his colleagues among the multitude. When the Greensboro story is over, the crowd disperses, most in a silent awe as if uttered words might break the spell. Eliot walks over to Andi and Will. They smile, then quietly walk to the corner where they separate to find their cars.
Eliot drives up Meridian. A few middle-class Negroes had belatedly colonized the Grandview Settlement to the north in Washington Township, but the vast majority of blacks remained south of Thirty-eighth Street in Center Township, and here in the Higher Twenties Eliot makes a left. He wears his glasses, which he only needs for driving. His childhood cross-eyed condition was corrected with prescription lenses, but as an adult it had developed into farsightedness in one eye and nearsightedness in the other. He spies the building, pulls over to the corner, and waits. Ten minutes later he glimpses movement in his rearview mirror, seeing her car turning the corner. She parks, gets out, locks the door, and strolls, smiling, absently swinging her keys. He thinks she should not be so careless with her keys while walking down a dark deserted street. She glances up, then passes her building, moving directly toward Eliot’s car. He rolls down the window, and Andi speaks.
“Hope you remembered your toothbrush this time.”
**
Wellman’s The Art of Cross-Examination. The Principles of Judicial Proof, or the Process of Proof as given by Logic, Psychology, and General Experience and Illustrated in Judicial Trials, Clarence Darrow’s Attorney for the Damned. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Path of the Law and The Common Law. The Proem to the Ideal Commonwealth of Plato: An Introduction to the Language and Method of the “Socratic” Dialogues.
“You like garlic?”
Eliot looks up from Andi’s bookcases. She stands over the stove, sautéing ground beef, her five-five frame seeming slightly taller in the slenderizing black shirt and slacks. Her apartment is small but functional, similar to his: kitchen, living room, bedroom with bath attached. They had not planned on meeting today but, since it happened, they made love earlier in the evening than usual, before dinner, and are now famished. It would depend on her mood, how much studying she had to do, whether he would be invited to breakfast as well. He’s already longing for the hash browns that had become their morning tradition. He had never heard of the dish before, something she’d picked up spending a college summer in Boston, and while he is still partial to his mother�
�s fried potatoes and onions, he’d developed a certain taste for this more stark treatment of the spud.
It had begun on a Friday in mid-January. A storm had started in the afternoon, sleet turning to snow, and everyone with any sense departed around 4:30 before driving would get worse. That left Eliot alone, Eliot who had just a bit more work, who promised to leave within the half-hour. Rushing to finish his task, he was surprised when ten minutes after the mass exodus he heard the elevator. Andi had just discovered she’d locked her car keys inside her vehicle. He heard her trying a couple of mechanics. Then sighing, apparently no one answering given the blizzard. City buses would be running intermittently if at all, so she called a taxi company. He heard her exclaiming into the receiver, her incredulity that she would be put at the end of a two-hour queue in which case, depending on the storm developments, a cab might come. While she was dialing another car service, Eliot interrupted her, saying he would drop her off at her home. It had been on his mind all along to offer, but he had worried she might take offense. And she did seem a bit taken aback, embarrassed, but at this point of desperation mostly eternally grateful. By the time he got to her place, the ten-minute drive taking nearly an hour, he could not argue with her insistence that he stay the night. Her living room couch turned out into a bed, and she made it up for him, putting cases on both pillows in case he preferred two. She fried chicken, the sole item left in her freezer, and had the ingredients for salad. She served them with wine, and afterward they sat on the couch-bed and stared out at the storm and talked for hours, about work, about the state of the country, Black America. Around two in the morning they were both bushed, and she had gone into her bedroom, closing the door. An hour and a half later, he’d awakened in the dark, and was startled to see her there, her back to the window, leaning on the radiator and staring at him. Caught, she began nervously chattering about how uncomfortably warm it was in her bedroom, how the radiator handle was permanently stuck on full blast, how she often came out into the living room to cool down, Was he cold?, she could get him extra blankets, and finally he had gently cut in, “Hey Andi,” lifting his blankets to reveal the side of the couch-bed closest to her, that part of the sheet and the pillowcase still crisp clean, and she had slipped in under the covers and that had been the first time.
Eliot has picked up the Plato, glancing through it. “Pretty light reading.”
She smiles without looking up from her cooking. “I’m forty-two, I don’t have time to waste. I wanna know right off the bat if I’m gonna follow through with this law school business, no cake courses. Wanna come out here and slice up the bread?”
They are sitting at the kitchen table twisting forks around spaghetti and meatballs when he asks her why. She chews several moments, considering, before replying.
“I guess law school had always been in the back of my head. Just got delayed. English undergrad.”
“Where?”
“University of Iowa. Tough for my parents, we were very poor.”
“Seven brothers and sisters.”
“Probably a mercy I was the only one inclined toward higher education. My parents were determined, and I worked my way through. I was about to graduate and already applying to law schools when Zay came along.”
“Zay?”
“My husband.”
He is agape. She laughs. “Yes, I used to be married. Xavier Meyers. I’d known him, philosophy, some of our courses overlapped. Also wanted to go to law school, eventually, and wanted me to stay home and make babies. Okay, I guess at the time I wasn’t so passionate about all those extra years of study as I thought I was. We had a wedding, he got a job with the city cleaning buses, I cleaned house for a white family. And then came a war.” She takes a bite of bread and shrugs, apparently having decided to end the story there.
“Then?” Eliot is aware that until now their post-coital discussions had usually gone back in history no further than the recent goings-on at the office.
“Then he enlisted. I got a defense job, Rosie the Riveter. We were both twenty-four.” She smiles. “I bet your mama and daddy hadn’t even thought about you back then.”
“I was around.” He doesn’t say he was seven. She always finds a way to maneuver in their age difference lest either of them ever forget it for a second, a pattern he finds irritating and unfair.
“So he enlisted, ’42. Sent to Europe. Still there ’44, then his letters stopped coming. When it was all over, I found out he’d been taken prisoner. Highly unusual because colored men were mostly banned from the front lines. Then the Battle of the Bulge. So many Allied casualties from Hitler’s last-ditch effort, they had to bring in the Negro troops. They held him—I’m not sure how long. As I understand it, the SS mostly killed colored POWs and pretty nastily, so I assume he escaped. He never talked about it after he came home.” She absently dabs her mouth with her linen napkin, red roses on a soft gray background. “Or, something of him did. Skeleton. And not just the starvation, they took a whole lot more than his flesh.” She sighs. “Do you want seconds?”
“What else did they take?”
She is quiet a few moments, staring at the two burning centerpiece candles, her sole effort to elevate the meal above the humdrum.
“Like some zombie movie. Body snatchers, I’d married this very nice man who sailed overseas and what returned.” Her eyes find Eliot. “Wrinkle in his shirt. An overcooked roast, his fury. I don’t remember how many times I ran home to Des Moines, busted lip, arm in a cast. My mother said don’t go back. If my father were still alive he’d’ve killed him. But my favorite aunt, the youngest one, teenager when I was a kid, Aunt Geri always with the laughter and good advice said stay. Aunt Geri said, Your vows were till death. So I went back. It almost was till death one night, his fingers around my throat. I’m watching the veins in his neck, his face quivering hate all hate. He ripped off my underwear, opened his fly, he.” She takes a breath. “On top of me. Crushing me, tearing me. I hit him with a lamp. I don’t know where that lamp came from. Blood! Everywhere, head wounds bleed like rivers and I ran. Out in the street, I don’t know if my wearing a dress was a curse as it made it easy for him in the first place, or a blessing as it made it easy for me to cover myself again when it was over. Trying to bring air back into my lungs and as soon as I did: screaming. The police came and he cried. Zay looked at me and he cried, not at my bruises. My terror, he saw how terrified I was of him, saw what he had become. It broke him.” She gently touches hot drips rolling down the side of the wax sticks.
“Then you left him.”
“Yep.” She wipes her fingers on her napkin, pushes her hair back from her face.
“He could’ve killed you.” She doesn’t reply. “You should have left him long before.”
“Yes. I could have walked into your office and you would have given me that detached glazed-eyed look: another trivial divorce case.”
He is thrown. “Andi.”
“And then with your perfectly dry voice you would have informed me that a man can’t rape his wife.”
“I don’t think your situation compares to a husband who wants a divorce from his pregnant wife to allow him more freedom to slip around with young girls!”
Andi nods, her thoughts distant. “You’re right, it doesn’t.” She stands, goes to the refrigerator. “Strawberries and cream for dessert?”
At the table he slices the berries. He tries remembering the clients for each of his divorce cases, specifically how sensitive an attorney he had been for them, or how not.
“The rape. I got pregnant.”
He puts the knife down.
“You have a child?”
She is momentarily confused. “Oh. No. No! I don’t have a child. I ended it. With Aunt Geri’s help. She knew a woman. I had a dishwashing job in a diner then, cost me a paycheck.” She picks up the knife and hands it back to him. He resumes his task, his slicing more agitated. �
��I can’t describe the pain. An operation without anesthesia. Without a real doctor. I bled for two days, I was afraid it wouldn’t stop. Then all the sudden, it did.”
He stops slicing, holding the knife perfectly still. “It sounds like you need to stop taking advice from Aunt Geri.”
Andi’s eyes narrow. “It was not bad advice.” She sighs and mutters, “Not the abortion part anyway. It’s not her fault that—” She sighs again. “It hasn’t been easy. You have no idea what it’s like to be a woman in law school, the condescension by some of those damn professors.” Shaking her head. “My previous job? Before Winston Douglas? I don’t think getting pinched on the ass should be an accepted inconvenience of the profession, I don’t think male divorce lawyers preying on female clients is just par for the course. Winston is one of the precious few firms that forbids such behavior. I’m lucky to be here now, but unless one of you moves on, I’ll likely be looking elsewhere after I pass the bar so I think, Am I insane, going into this? Then I think, That’s why I’m going into this. Those lynching photos. What’s going on in Greensboro. A thousand Negro whys, yes, and a few female whys too.” She takes a berry slice from his bowl and chews. “It came up in the women’s bathroom. I was suspicious, what motivated this white law student to go to the Negro law student as if she assumed I’d know all about it. And then I thought, Whatever her reasons, we, women, need to strategize, to work together toward legalization: safe, hospital abortion. It was all hush-hush, cautiously investigating the viewpoints of other co-eds. Most of whom had no interest, the women in law wanting to assimilate as best they could into the world of male law, same for the budding physicians, though the nursing students were more open. Four of us now, two white, two Negro. We meet Thursday evenings after my class.”
