by Tayari Jones
Working at the Institute had shown me that my mother and I had things in common after all. We were the best-dressed women there. Makeup and hose, even though most of the clientele couldn’t appreciate our efforts. I think we both knew it was silly, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We never spoke of it, but we dressed the way we did because we spent most of our day around white people and we didn’t want to give them any reason to think they were better than us. Mother had come by this insecurity quite honestly—she’d grown up during Jim Crow—but I learned it from her and from whatever had come twined into my DNA.
Drew Alexander had been blind only three or so months when I met him. Some sort of congenital problem, he’d explained to me. His eyesight just got worse and worse and now he couldn’t see at all. He was young, less than thirty, and angry.
“Bum genes,” he said. “Something passed down from my father. I never met him, but he left me something to remember him by, didn’t he?” His accent was sugary, southern white. Whenever I heard someone speak that way, the words so lazy they seemed to be lying down, it made me feel like only white people were really southerners. That the rest of us were just squatters.
Drew Alexander laughed with good-looking teeth, blue-white and shiny. He was a living endorsement for his designer jeans. Slim, cornflake blond, masculine, but leaning toward androgyny. He smelled nice, like spearmint and lemon zest.
“Did you want me to read something for you?” I said. “I read for people.”
“How do you get a dog? That’s what I want. A big German shepherd.”
“I can refer you to someone. You’ll probably get a yellow Lab. I see a lot of Labs.”
“I don’t care what you see.”
I became very quiet. This was how you made yourself invisible to blind people.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Would you like me to read something to you? I can read a book if you like, a magazine. We have some here; or maybe you brought something with you?”
“Are you pretty?” he said. “What do you look like? I can tell from the way you talk that you’re African American. I don’t mean any offense by that. But y’all talk different than white people.”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see me.
“So what do you look like? Are you sexy? Do you have big tits?”
“Mr. Alexander,” I said, “this is not appropriate.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “Mea culpa. I just keep getting out of hand. I don’t mean you no harm. It’s hard not being able to see things. Waiting for somebody to tell you what’s in front of your face. It’s hard. But I do have something I need to get read to me. Let me just pull it out of my bag.”
He bent down to rummage through his sack and I noticed that his hair was dyed blond. The roots were dark as dirt. I wondered who colored it for him. Did they assure him that it looked good, that it brought out the green of his eyes?
He placed a worn magazine on my desk. Pornography. The real stuff. Not Playboy. This was hard-core. I rolled my chair away from my desk and started toward the door, but Drew Alexander blocked my way. He reached for me, holding me around the waist. He took his shades off and showed me his eyes, hazel and empty. His lips were against my cheek; he spoke, scraping my skin with his tongue. “Don’t be so mean. Don’t be scared. It don’t matter if you’re ugly.”
I struggled to get away from him and he held me harder, pressing me against the wall. The light switch gouged my shoulder blade.
“Help,” I screamed, hoping my voice would carry through the shut door. “Fire!”
“Don’t be so mean,” he said, squirming against me. It didn’t matter how quiet I made myself now. He was touching me. “Be nice.”
I pitched my voice louder. “Help!”
My mother opened the door. “What is the problem?”
Drew Alexander released me. My impulse was to run to my mother, receive the hug that should have been her impulse to offer.
“Mama,” I said, returning to my desk and handing her the magazine. “He brought this in and then he grabbed me.”
My mother glanced at the magazine and rolled it into a club. “Mr. Alexander, I believe you were banned from the Institute a month ago? I am asking you to leave. Or do I have to call security?”
“Where’s my cane?” he said. “I can’t see to get out without my cane.”
I took it from the arm of his chair and gave it to him. He tapped out with a delicate noise.
I sat down on the sharp edge of my desk and buried my face in my hands.
“That was awful,” I said to my mother. “He attacked me.”
“It’s you,” Mother said. “Only you could almost be raped by a blind man in a public place. Is this what Dr. King died for?”
The next week, I noticed a newspaper ad for a job fair sponsored by the Urban League. When I read this notice aloud, the enthusiasm in my voice was real.
The job fair was held in a huge conference center, crammed with business-suited black people scuttling around rows of tables decorated with various corporate logos. I pulled my résumé from my leather portfolio several times, to assure myself that it was still there and that it looked good. It listed anything I thought would make me more attractive to employers, including a bulleted list of “personal traits”: self-starter, creative, great people skills, mature. I’d spent more than three hours checking it for errors, consulting the real dictionary when I doubted the accuracy of my word processor’s spell-check. As an extra flourish I’d spent an additional ten cents a page for heavy paper the color of pigeons.
The recruiters reclined in their chairs, waiting for an irresistible candidate to show herself. They all had that slightly bored, cocky attitude like obviously rich or handsome men in nightclubs. They spoke to each other with knowing looks as they sipped soft drinks. I handed a lady from Coca-Cola my résumé; she nodded, put it on the bottom of a stack of other people’s histories, and shoved a red and white brochure in my direction. I repeated this scenario at a few other tables—Georgia Power, Delta Airlines, BellSouth. Hi, my name is Aria Jackson. Here’s my résumé; I look forward to hearing from you. And, true to the nightclub model, they all promised to call.
Walking toward the back of the room to get one of the free Cokes chilling in a humming cooler, I ran into a chubby man wearing a wool suit; it wasn’t a great suit, but it was decent. He was older than most of the other job seekers. I put him at about forty-two. Maybe he’d been laid off and was now looking for a second career. I felt a little sorry for him, but he seemed to be in a grand mood, winking at me as he reached into the cooler.
“Having much luck?” He handed me a caffeine-free Diet Coke.
I shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Nobody flat-out refused to take my résumé.”
“What kind of work are you looking for?”
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “I was thinking maybe I’d like to get into advertising or PR.”
“How come?”
“I want a job that’s positive. Upbeat.”
“What have you been doing till now?”
I shrugged. “This and that.”
He took the can from me and opened it with a gadget on his key chain. “I hope I’m not being too forward, but I think you would squander your talents in advertising. What would you do all day working for Georgia Power? Get people to use sixty-watt bulbs? That’s a waste of time. I can promise you, people are going to burn electricity with or without you.” He took a slurp of Cherry Coke before handing me a business card, a flimsy one, obviously run off on his laser printer. “Do you have any experience working with special populations?”
“I won’t work with blind people,” I said.
“I can guarantee you that there are no blind people in my organization. We do literacy, and not in braille. Think about it. Call me.”
Two weeks after the job fair none of the employers had contacted me for an interview. I called Lawrence on
Friday. He asked me if I could come in Monday morning for training. My mother was furious with me for leaving the Institute on such short notice, but I was glad to get away before I had to read the Sunday paper with all its coupons and comics.
Literacy Action and Resource Center is a lot of name for an organization that consists of three people: Lawrence, Rochelle, and me. Rochelle came on board about two years ago to replace this guy named Khafre who quit working at LARC in order to go to law school. Rochelle had just dropped out of Emory University, where she was working toward a Ph.D. in English. “It was just so esoteric,” she had told Lawrence when she met him at the NAACP job fair. They’d run into each other at the blood pressure machine. Later I found out that Lawrence went to the fairs but didn’t pay to set up a table. Instead, when he needed someone, he roamed the venue looking for the kind of person he wanted.
Lawrence hired Rochelle that very day; he liked that she used the word “esoteric.” After he decided she was too valuable to be cooped up in the classroom all day, Rochelle was named “development coordinator,” but she taught one section of general literacy every other year. Her job was a little better than mine. Same pay but more prestige. She was the one who represented LARC at fund-raising luncheons. Rochelle made conversation with the donors, laughing at their esoteric jokes and making smart comments beginning with “actually,” while Lawrence and I listened politely and tried not to draw attention to ourselves or mispronounce anything. Rochelle was kind enough to never mention this invisible caste system, not even in jest.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I teach GED prep to twelve teenage girls who are “under the supervision of the Fulton County Court.” This twist in the clientele is due to Rochelle’s flair for grant writing. She’s always proposing new classes in order to tap new sources. This prison thing has been a bonanza all the way around. Lawrence teaches two sections a week at the federal prison in Reidsville, sleeping over in a Days Inn in nearby Vidalia. Of course this means that some of our general literacy sections have been put on hiatus, but our numbers are up. This year we’ve accommodated thirteen percent more students than the year before.
At first I had been a little apprehensive about taking on juvenile offenders. It wasn’t the offender dimension that upset me so much as the juvie part. After walking through the fire at six high schools in four years, I didn’t want to be even a spectator to adolescence. But here I was, three times a week in front of an eclectic class of unlucky girls. The youngest ones were fifteen, and the old ladies of the group were nearly twenty. Knowing how it feels not to be the teacher’s pet, I tried to treat each of my students equally. But I was partial to Keisha Evers—seventeen and just a tiny bit pregnant.
Usually it takes about three weeks for the classroom dynamic to jell, but this term we had all found our places on the very first day. As usual I started class by asking each girl to give her name, age, and something that made her unique. Keisha did as she was told, then blurted, “It wasn’t like they said it was. He told me I could use his Discover to get me some clothes and everything. Then when the bill came, he let his wife call the law, saying I stole it when he was supposed to be mentoring me.”
I looked at the roll to remember her name, then said, “LaKeisha, that is a little more information than I asked for.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s what everybody wants to know. Don’t nobody care who in here is double-jointed.” She touched the knee of the young woman beside her, who had offered her deformed elbows as proof of her uniqueness. “No offense,” she said before going on. “I’m just saying that we should get to tell our side of the story. That’s all people want anyway.”
“That may be,” I said, looking at the bookmarks I’d planned to give as prizes to the students who could remember all their classmates’ names and quirks. “But I don’t want to invade anyone’s privacy.”
“It’s not like that,” Keisha said, turning again to her double-jointed neighbor. “Why you in here? What’s your name again?”
“Angelina,” she said, picking orange polish from her cuticle. “They found drugs in my apartment. It wasn’t a lot and it wasn’t all for me.”
And so they had gone around the room. Some girls spun elaborate tales involving boyfriends, addictions, abuse, and misunderstandings. They talked about their kids. Two or three just mumbled a charge and an apology. Many of the stories were as thin and translucent as rice paper, but a few weighed in with the thick heft of truth.
Keisha watched her classmates as they spoke, nodding earnestly and rubbing gentle circles on her bulb of a stomach. She made sympathetic comments where there were pauses: “That wasn’t nothing but racism” or “That right there was just your lawyer’s fault.” She pointed at each girl when it was time for her to speak.
When each person in the tight circle of metal desk chairs had introduced and explained herself, Keisha turned to me. “So, miss,” she said, “what about you?”
I fingered the orange and green bookmarks and said, “Well, I’m originally from here. Got my degree at Spelman. I’ve been teaching literacy for four and a half years.”
She rolled her eyes a little and glanced at her classmates. “Not résumé stuff. We want to know what’s really up with you.”
I thought about Lawrence and his warning about “boundaries.” He’d lectured me during my orientation meeting: Do not socialize with your clients; it’s inappropriate and counterproductive. And some of the people who will come through these doors are master con artists. The rest just want you to save them. Either way, it’s bad news and it’s the reason why you need to have clear and firm boundaries.
I had tried to do it Lawrence’s way at first—avoiding lingering eye contact, offering no details about my personal life. If someone had asked me my zodiac sign, I’d have refused to reply. But then I had been working nights, teaching older students who just wanted to learn. They weren’t curious about my personal narrative and weren’t interested in sharing theirs. They just wanted to read well enough to get their GEDs or driver’s licenses. At Christmas they all chipped in to buy me a silver-plated desk set, and that was about as intimate as it got.
But on the first day of this term, I’d been in the center of a ring of girls, their faces wide-open like ceramic bowls. The twelve of them had stared at me with almost tangible anticipation.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s really nothing to tell.”
“Oh, come on,” Keisha said with the grit of annoyance and the sugar of pleading. “Tell us something. How old are you? Are you married?”
“This is a little inappropriate,” I said in a voice that I hoped was clear and firm.
The dozen young women had sighed in disappointed unison and had opened their textbooks.
Now we were five weeks into a fifteen-week term and I’d thought back on that moment several times. There were only eight girls left out of our original twelve. Tomeika got caught smoking crack, just down the block from my house. As our in-class writing assignment we wrote letters to her. I didn’t know what to write, so I sent her copies of our reading assignments, poetry by Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. I hoped it might help somehow. Double-jointed Angelina and pretty Benita just disappeared. Lani said she was bored and dropped out.
Each time I whited out a name from my roll book, I remembered that moment and their open faces and I wondered how much blame I should heap onto my plate.
Lawrence tells me not to mourn. At least nobody died. Two people up in Reidsville had passed away on him already. On the first day of the term he had warned me that I should expect a few to recidivate, a few to vanish, and at least one to die. Some days, when my girls were quiet and hunched over their workbooks, I wondered which of them it would be.
After class today, when I’d gathered all my things and left the building, I found Keisha sitting on the porch swing. She didn’t pretend not to be waiting for me. She used to do that at first, rummaging through her large purse, looking for keys, although she always rode the bus
to class. Now she sat openly, whipping her eyes toward the door when it opened. Rocking in the wood swing, she chipped layers of paint with her airbrushed fingernails. Her pooch of a belly protruded just farther than her apple-sized breasts.
“Hey,” she said, patting the space on the swing beside her. “Be careful. It’s hot.”
I eased down and felt the heat through my slacks. I sat next to her, rocking back and forth in the heavy air. From the porch I could see the roof of the Phillis Wheatley YWCA—my family’s destination on the day of the accident. I think that I like being so close to the place where everything changed. It’s a sort of daily explanation of why things are as they are. It’s like keeping a picture of Sir Isaac Newton on your desk to keep from forgetting about the fundamental nature of gravity.
My mother thinks this is perverse, and allegedly this is why she never comes to visit me. She and I agree that the past is alive and thriving in Southwest Atlanta. Mama believes that the intensity of pain is directly related to proximity. This is why she likes living where she does—close enough to ache but too far to actually bleed. She will never come to my house, and, sometimes, this pleases me. Hermione has never visited either, and this snub breaks my heart. She can’t blame it on my zip code. As far as my sister is concerned, the past has passed. Mama and I need to just move on. At least this is what she says. I find it hard to believe that someone as bright as Hermione would not see what is so obvious. The past is a dark vast lake and we just tread on its delicate skin.
