I was determined not to “get a girl in trouble.” Like most boys, I was self-reliant in the pleasure department, though sometimes I prayed for forgiveness after my self-pollution. During my teens, I had two girlfriends, Yvonne from the choir and later Elise from my senior English class. I had kissed each to the point of arousal. With Elise, whose penny-bright skin was simultaneously cool and hot, I sometimes went past that point, which left a quarter-sized wet spot in my crotch. Embarrassing, yes, but nobody got pregnant. Technically, then, I was a virgin when I headed south to Bible college.
My particular Protestant denomination—which shall remain unnamed here—was like most others in 1950s America. With great emphasis on the inerrancy of Scripture, it tended to the next life, leaving unquestioned and intact the injustices of this one, as a matter of social order. Practically all Christian churches accepted legal racial segregation in the South and de facto racial segregation in the rest of the nation as part of God’s plan. Many denominations maintained national headquarters and seminaries in major cities, but black seminarians (or colored, as we were then) generally attended less well-endowed Bible schools below the Mason-Dixon Line.
My own school will also remain unnamed, though if you’re the type who does historical research on strange stories you’ll be able to figure out which one it is. Like most similar institutions, my seminary was in a small, largely black town and had fewer amenities than its all-white counterparts. We had older books, secondhand furniture, and buildings in greater disrepair. And we lacked a dormitory. Young men of color who answered the call (no women were ordained then) rented rooms in the homes of host families, most of whom regularly attended services at the college chapel, where every student delivered his first sermons. The system worked well. It offered seminarians a room and a place at a family table for a modest sum and allowed host families to supplement their own limited incomes. Most hosts were couples with no children, young children, or no teenaged girls. The lone exception was Sister Bessie Samples, whom my advisor’s summer letter described as “a prim, pious widow whose late husband served as a seminary dean for fifteen years.”
I was assigned to the home of Sister Bessie, a retired nurse from up north who would tolerate no smoking or drinking or inappropriate behavior. Included in the letter was a black-and-white photo of a rambling clapboard structure with three stories and a wraparound porch. “She sounds like an old nun,” my father said at dinner that evening. But my mother approved of the placement, saying that my volunteer work at the nursing home would come in handy and I could help Sister Bessie with household chores. I suspected they both really meant the housing arrangement would save me from premature parenthood.
In late August, after a too-long, too-hot train ride—during which I had to change to the colored passenger car once we reached the South—a clanking, bald-tired taxi dropped me at the end of a short street with few houses, in front of Sister Bessie’s. My first surprise was the color, light gray instead of the white I’d expected from the snapshot. But having traveled all night, I wanted nothing more than to sprawl across my new bed, even though it was still midafternoon. A suitcase in each hand, I went up the steps and knocked on the wood screen door. Then came my second surprise. A petite, coffee-colored woman in a blue housedress opened the front door. She had a ready smile and glittering eyes beneath a short black perm. She pushed opened the screen and held out her hand and said, “You must be Lucas Jackson. I’m Bessie Samples.” For a moment after shaking her hand I just stood there, my picture of a severe church lady and foster grandmother shattered. Mrs. Samples, as I had addressed her, couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than my mother. “Call me Sister Bessie,” she said. “I’ll show you to your room.”
I stepped into a semicircular foyer, onto a threadbare rug that might have been brand new in the Wilson administration. The air smelled of dusty curtains, dried paste wax, peeling wallpaper, and cracked upholstery. The house felt too old to be occupied by a woman so young. I thought it more suited to the older man whose stern, bespectacled face stared back at me from several framed photographs on the walls. Though part of me hoped the man was Sister Bessie’s father, I knew at once he was her husband.
I followed her up creaking old stairs to the third floor, which had a heavy-looking door on each end of the corridor and one in the middle. “This is the little bathroom,” she said, indicating the center door. She pushed it open just enough for me to glimpse a sink, toilet and claw-foot tub. The door on the right led to a small room with rose wallpaper, a three-shelf bookcase, a narrow bed, a student desk against the dormer window, and a large mahogany wardrobe in the far corner. “Sorry there’s no closet,” Sister Bessie said, “but I think that chifforobe is big enough.”
Biting back a smile at the word chifforobe—which my mother used and my father said made her sound old—I set down my suitcases. “It’ll be fine, ma’am.” Then I thanked her for her hospitality.
“I expect you want to rest up,” she said. “Come on down for supper about six-thirty. Then we can go over the house rules.”
Supper consisted of corn, baked squash, collard greens, potatoes and the best fried chicken I’d tasted since my grandmother died. As we ate, she recited the house rules in a soft voice that belied the seriousness in her luminous brown eyes: no smoking, drinking or female visitors—but classmates were welcome to join me in the parlor for chess or checkers or one of the board games her husband had collected. “Walter used to say the Lord’s work demands a mind at peace with itself, and games are a good way to settle the brain.” She nodded toward another picture of the man I’d seen in the foyer, and I found it hard to picture them together as husband and wife. I couldn’t imagine why she’d want such a face looking at her in almost every room.
I blinked and returned my attention to her just as she was explaining that supper was at six-thirty every night except on those days she might be delayed at Dr. Bledsoe’s office. Hiram Bledsoe, she explained, was the only colored physician in the region, with an office almost fifty miles away. Though she had retired from nursing, four or five times a month she made the drive to his office to help out. He paid her a small stipend for her services and kept her well supplied with basic medicines so she could treat the sick in her own town. Whenever she was late returning from Dr. Bledsoe’s, I was to cook my own dinner or make a sandwich.
I had to be in by ten each night. “Most likely you’ll be in before then ’cause there’s not much to do in this town.” I was responsible for cleaning my own room and the bathroom beside it, as well as washing dishes and helping her with yard work. She did laundry every Monday, but I had to carry my hamper down to the first-floor laundry room. I had unlimited access to every room in the house except, of course, her second floor bedroom and bath and the third floor storage room at the opposite end of the hall. The books in her husband’s first-floor study might be of particular interest. “Many aren’t in the seminary library, which gives you a leg up on your classmates.” If my studies were done for the day, I could watch one of the two television stations any evening of the week except Saturday or Sunday, but I was welcome to join her those nights for “Gunsmoke” and “Ed Sullivan.” She seldom listened to radio dramas anymore, so I could take the tabletop model in the parlor up to my room but I must keep the volume low. Then she asked if I had any questions. When I shook my head, she smiled and patted my hand, which gave me a tiny electric jolt.
I remembered the shock in bed that night and thought of her pleasant face and wide smile. Deciding she was pretty for an older woman, I reached for myself. But I stopped before finishing, partly because I was uneasy about staining sheets she would launder and partly because I had a fleeting thought that Walter might be staring at me from beyond the unfamiliar walls. If I was going to resume the habit that had been such a struggle for me, I’d have to invest in Kleenex and decorate the room to make it my own.
We settled into a workable routine quickly and easily. I rose each morning at seven, by which tim
e Sister Bessie had gathered eggs from the chicken coop she kept out back and made breakfast. By seven-thirty, her husband’s black lunch pail in hand, I was out the door for the two-mile walk to the seminary, where class began at eight-thirty. By four-thirty or five I was climbing the front porch steps, prepared to study or undertake whatever chores my hostess wanted done before supper. After washing and drying the dishes, I spent an hour or two studying in my room, which I had personalized by shelving my few books and putting family pictures atop the bookcase. Sometimes while I washed the dishes, Sister Bessie would receive a visitor she took into Walter’s study. In my first month I saw a mother with a child who looked sick and a woman whose abdomen was so large it seemed she might have the baby right there. (The telephone on a small table at the foot of the stairs jangled a few nights later, and Sister Bessie left to deliver that baby.) A few times the visitor she escorted into the study was a healthy-looking girl or young woman whose face was taut with worry. These she always drove home herself, later.
A couple of times a week I watched something on television but was always in bed by ten, except when I joined Sister Bessie for “Gunsmoke” on Saturday night. On Sunday, in her blue Pontiac, she drove us both to services at the seminary chapel, where I sat with my classmates while she took her place in the pew dedicated to Walter’s memory. On Sunday evening we added “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” to our viewing. Sometimes at night, especially after we had watched something together, I would lie alone in bed picturing the light in her eyes and the softness of her skin and imagining the music of her voice. Pictures of my parents and siblings having helped push Walter into the background, I would relieve myself. I always put the wad of Kleenex into a pocket of the trousers I would wear the next day so I could dispose of the evidence after I left. My vague shame aside, those first weeks passed with a comfort I hoped would stretch through four years of study.
Then everything changed.
One afternoon in late October I came home to find Sister Bessie seated in her rocker in the half-darkened parlor, gazing at the windows as if she could see through the thick curtains. Wearing a black dress I’d never seen, she kept her hands in her lap. The tail of a wrinkled white handkerchief stuck out of one fist and a framed photo of Walter was clutched in the other. She turned to me when I asked if she was all right, and the tears on her cheeks glistened. “Walter died today,” she whispered, wiping her eyes. “Five years ago today. I always have trouble getting through this night.”
“I understand.” I perched on the edge of the armchair across from her and gently took the photo. I sat back, studied it. The first time I had seen Walter, I had been surprised at how old he looked—white hair, pouched eyes—and calculated he must have been at least twenty-five years his wife’s senior. Now I saw the firmness of his jaw, the precision with which he trimmed his mustache and thick brows, the knowing kindness behind the horn-rimmed glasses. “You must miss him. Everybody at school says he was a great man.”
“He was,” she said, “and a wonderful husband.” I handed back the photo. Then she told me about the Reverend Walter Samples, the man whose face I couldn’t walk five paces without seeing. They had met when he was a visiting pastor at a small church in Harlem. She herself had belonged to another church but had been one of the registered nurses at a small colored hospital who cared for him after an emergency appendectomy. “He was gentle and kind and never complained about pain. But there was sadness in him beyond pain. You see, his wife had died in childbirth a year earlier, with the baby stillborn. Walter had this energy that demanded you pay attention to him, a strength that needed to be shared with more than church folk. But he was all alone. I had no parents, no real friends…” Their courtship had been brief, and she had been with him for two postings before he got the call to the seminary. They’d had twenty happy years together. “My biggest regret,” she said, “is that I never gave him the child he wanted.”
I never felt more drawn to her, more aroused, than I did that afternoon. I ached to hold her, to help her ease the pain. I imagined myself brushing her hair aside, pressing my lips to her forehead as I whispered reassurances, trailing kisses down her cheek. But I dared not cross the line that stretched between us. I made dinner for her instead—hamburgers, peas, fried potatoes. Afterward, she went upstairs early, and I, unable to study, spent the evening in front of the television, from “Phil Silvers” right through “Red Skelton.” At ten I climbed the stairs to my room, surprised to see light below the door of the third floor storage room and to hear the periodic sniffle of someone fighting back tears. With Bessie back in my mind, I went into my room determined to discharge my desire with Vaseline and Kleenex. But my attempt was half-hearted in the wake of her grief and I gave up because I felt cheap and dirty for wanting a woman still crying for her dead husband. I fell asleep thinking of her, which is why, later, when I stirred at the sound of my door opening, I thought I might be dreaming.
Before reason could settle into my waking brain, Sister Bessie slipped into bed beside me, and my breath caught. “I don’t mean to startle you, Lucas,” she whispered, as if there were someone else in the house to hear. “I just need to feel somebody warm next to me tonight.” She turned away from me, easing her back against me and pulling my right arm over her stomach. “Thank you for letting me ramble on about Walter. You’re very sweet.”
I was too terrified to move, but my body reacted to her nevertheless. Even with my cotton pajamas and her flannel nightgown between us, the cleft of her buttocks was a perfect nesting place for my yet-untested manhood. I thickened almost instantly, feeling the pressure of her nearness become a sweet tingling in my belly and balls. My heart slammed against the wall of my chest and I swallowed again and again. Still I dared not move because I did not want to disrespect her, to misunderstand what she intended by coming into my bed. After a minute or two she released my arm and reached behind herself to touch me through my pajama bottom. Her fingers were long and thin and unbuttoned the opening with no trouble. They wriggled inside and took hold, a single fingernail gently scratching my scrotum and her thumb making circles in the mat of my pubic hair. She guided my painfully hard penis through the opening and whispered, “Lift my gown.” I obeyed, and she raised herself enough to let the flannel be drawn above her hips. Then she raised her right leg and locked it behind me, drawing me against her and into a warmth and wetness ever so much better than my hand. Almost disbelieving that I was at last losing my virginity, I sank deep inside her and shuddered. She began to grind against me, moaning softly, pulling me into her and relaxing enough to let me slide back, probably only four or five times before I spilled into her years of fantasy and fear—Yvonne and Elise and getting a girl in trouble. “Don’t stop,” she breathed. “You’re young. You can get hard again.” And I did.
I slept soundly that night, stirring only once sometime after three when I thought I heard something like creaking floorboards. But Bessie was still curled against me, breathing easily, holding my fingers against her belly with both hands—and I slipped back into sleep without fully emerging from it.
When I woke the next morning I was alone. For a moment I entertained the idea it had all been a dream born of desire so intense it had erased the line between the real and the unreal. But when I slid out of bed to use the bathroom I could not deny the crust on the sheet that flaked beneath my fingertips or the whitish residue that ringed the head of my penis. The realization that finally I’d experienced sex so overwhelmed me I needed to steady myself by gripping the pedestal sink with one hand as I used the other to guide my pee into the toilet. My flash of pride was replaced by a rush of shame for having taken advantage of Sister Bessie’s grief. Not only was she somewhere around my mother’s age, we’d had sex outside of marriage. I had been raised to believe fornication was wrong. Now the prospect of facing her in the morning light made me dawdle over washing and dressing.
As I left my room to go down for breakfast, I noticed the storage room door was ajar. I pushed it ope
n quietly—only to find it too dim to see inside—and turned on the light.
The layout was the mirror image of my own room, but the similarity stopped there. The curtains over the dormer were faded from sunlight and discolored with dust. On the dresser lay a wallet, fountain pen, gold pocket watch, gold cross, and Bible with a cracked binding. Men’s shoes—five or six pairs—were lined up against the baseboard of the far wall. The walls held pictures of Walter and certificates that bore his name. The largest photograph was flanked by two wall sconces with melted-down white candles not dusty enough to have been in the room as long as everything else. On a hook near one of the sconces hung the black dress Bessie had worn the previous day, and I wondered if she had stretched out naked on this bed beside the layers of men’s clothing it held. Atop the pile was a black clerical suit with an unsnapped white collar, laid out as if the body inside had simply disappeared. But the disappearance felt recent, for as I stood inhaling shoe leather and fabric and dust I realized I had smelled Walter on his widow in my bed.
Shaking, I switched off the light and closed the door as quietly as I had opened it. I returned to the bathroom, to wash the smell of the tomb off my hands and out of my nose. Then I went down to breakfast late, afraid to meet Sister Bessie’s gaze but ever conscious of Walter’s scrutiny as I passed every picture of him from the second floor to the kitchen.
She set the plate of eggs, toast and sausage in front of me as if nothing had happened, then stepped back and smoothed her yellow housedress. “We need to talk.”
Still afraid to look up at her, I mumbled some kind of apology about last night. “I didn’t mean to…to…”
“Felt like you meant it,” she said. “And it would hurt my feelings if you didn’t.”
“But what we did…it was a…” I wanted to use the word sin but couldn’t bring myself to say it to the minister’s widow who’d taken my virginity while maintaining a museum exhibit. “All my fault,” I said, certain I was apologizing to both of them.
Darker Edge of Desire Page 4
