What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

by E. Lynn Harris

  I would tell the officials that I was from Michigan and I had stopped at the Woolworth’s while my bus took a brief rest stop in Little Rock. If they released me I would promise never to show my face in Little Rock ever again. I would tell them that my parents were wealthy funeral home owners. But what if they wanted to call my parents before sending me home? I didn’t even know the area code for Michigan. During the time that I was there, when I became bored thinking of how I was going to secure my release, I created stories about my adult life when I would leave Arkansas for good. I wanted to go to New York and move to Harlem and live like the character John from my favorite novel, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

  I managed a second day and night without speaking, but when Sunday morning came, I thought of my mama and sisters getting ready for church and I suddenly became very sad. I would have given anything to be at home preparing for Sunday School. I missed my family. I wondered if they missed me too, and if they were frightened that something terrible had happened to me.

  As the day passed, I became angry at myself. I had wanted to secure a good job to help my mother, since she no longer had a husband because of me. I wanted to be the man of the house, but here I was stuck in Juvenile Hall. I began to worry about my job. What if Mr. Seligman found out? He would fire me immediately, and then I wouldn’t have a summer job, which meant no new school clothes. I knew I would have to leave Little Rock when word got out that I had been in jail. This was a humiliation I would never live down.

  Then I did something I always did when I was really afraid: I got down on my knees on the hard concrete floor, and I prayed to God that He would rescue me and take me away from the jail and Arkansas forever. Almost immediately I felt better, knowing something would happen.

  Sure enough, Monday morning it appeared that my prayers were answered. It was still dark outside, but I knew daybreak was close because the sounds of cars had increased. I stood and looked out the window, feeling sorry for myself and wishing I were on a bus heading to work after a weekend rest, when I heard the key to my cell turn. It was too early for breakfast, and I wondered what was happening. Were they going to beat the truth out of me?

  When the door opened, the guard led in a regal-looking black lady with beautiful brown skin and black and gray hair, fashionably styled. She started to ask me questions, which I still didn’t answer. She seemed nice and looked vaguely familiar. She put her index finger to her polished lips, turned and faced the guard, then suddenly positioned herself directly in front of me and said, “You’re Bessie’s grandson, aren’t you?” I didn’t answer, but my face gave me away. She looked at the guard and said, “I thought so. His family has been looking for him all weekend.”

  A couple of hours later, the guard reappeared and escorted me to the communal rest room, where he instructed me to shower and returned my clothes without giving me any indication what was going on. Once I was dressed he led me to the lobby of the building, where I saw my mama standing with her arms folded tightly. I was so excited to see her that I raced into her arms and hugged her. Tears formed in my eyes, but they didn’t slide down my face. Mama hugged me back while she whispered in my ear, “I’m going to tear your butt up when I get home from work.”

  My silence continued as I got into Mama’s car and she took me to a nearby bus stand and told me to carry my behind home and not to leave the house. When I asked if I could go to work, she said “Yes” but instructed me to come home right after I clocked out.

  When I walked into the Arkansas Paper Company almost two hours late, I saw Mr. Seligman with a coffee cup in his hand and a bright smile.

  “How was your weekend, Lynn?” he asked.

  “It was fine, sir, but I couldn’t wait to get back to work,” I said, happy to once again hear my own voice.

  I was hoping that a day at work would cool Mama off and she would forget her jailhouse promise, but she didn’t. I got the whipping I deserved.

  Still, a whipping from Mama was different from one of Ben’s, because she always felt bad afterward, so lots of reassuring hugs and love followed. A couple of hours later, as I lay on my bed convinced that I wouldn’t steal another thing in life, and would never ever spend another night in jail, Mama served me chocolate ice cream and pound cake in bed and gave me advice I would always try and follow the rest of my life: “You’re smart, baby. Don’t use that gift for bad. Use it for good.”

  IT WAS DURING MY NINTH-GRADE YEAR that I had my first sexual encounter. It was with a girl from the neighborhood who’d made advances toward me. One evening when her parents were still at work, she invited me up to her bedroom. I remember feeling both excited and nervous, wondering if I was doing it right, and for days I couldn’t get the intoxicating smell of sex out of my mind. We had sex a couple more times before I surrendered to the other sexual thoughts I’d tried to suppress since seventh grade. I would learn that other young men were thinking the same things I was. I wasn’t the only one.

  One morning while I was walking to West Side Junior High I passed by the massive Central High, as I did every day, and spotted the object of my first bout of lust: a boy two grades ahead of me. I knew who he was because he was a track and football player for the Central High Tigers. That morning our eyes met briefly, and I felt tiny sparks dance through my body. This was something that hadn’t happened when I’d been with a girl.

  A couple of days later I was headed home, and as I passed Quigley Stadium, which was adjacent to Central, I saw him again. This time he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt that was cut right above his navel and gray running shorts, and he was carrying a football helmet. I couldn’t help but stare at his honey-amber skin and marvel at his body, one that was perfect and usually reserved for Greek statues. He caught me staring at him and walked toward me. I expected him to angrily demand what I was looking at, but instead in a wordless command he motioned for me to follow him to an empty corner of the stadium into the sun-pulled shades of twilight, and I had my first physical contact with a boy—a boy who looked and carried himself like a man.

  The sexual contact went on for more than a semester—usually at my mother’s house in the early morning after my sisters had left for school—even though he would barely talk to me. Still, I loved the way he smelled and how my heart would race when I would see him silently take off his skintight jeans to reveal white Jockey underwear that always looked new. It ended one morning when I spotted him and several other Central High football players, both black and white, sitting on cars whistling at girls as they strolled toward the high school. Our eyes met briefly, and while I continued looking in his direction for some sort of recognition, he turned to a friend and whispered into his ear and started laughing so hard that he rolled off the car. I figured he had said something about me, and I increased my pace as I began to perspire with embarrassment.

  We would never again meet at my mother’s house or in our private spot in the stadium, as he started dating and later married one of Little Rock’s most notable beauties after she got pregnant.

  CHAPTER 4

  When the time came for me to enter high school, I again left my neighborhood and ventured into the unknown and unfamiliar. Instead of attending the historic Little Rock Central High, which was within walking distance of my house and which all my classmates from West Side would be attending, I decided to attend Hall High.

  Hall High opened and closed in 1957. It was closed by order of then–Arkansas Governor Orville Fabus after the National Guard came to Little Rock to protect the brave nine black students who entered Central in 1957. Rather than allow “The Little Rock Nine,” as they came to be known, to attend Central, Governor Fabus ordered all the schools in the capital city closed.

  Hall High was a modern orange brick building located in a wealthy section of west Little Rock, a neighborhood of beautiful mansions in the shadows of gently rolling hills. With an enrollment of more than fifteen hundred in 1970, Hall was one of the largest schools in the state, though its minority enrollme
nt was less than 5 percent.

  For the first time, I was surrounded by the white folks I saw on television, the ones I had expected at West Side. I was able to attend Hall because of a program implemented by the school board called Freedom of Choice, which allowed black students to attend a school where they were a minority. This meant all of the city’s high schools were open to black students. The one all-black high school, the much-loved Horace Mann High, was being phased out and didn’t enroll a sophomore class in the fall of 1970.

  When I entered Hall for the first day of classes, I didn’t know what to expect. Filled with a mixture of joy and self-consciousness, I wondered whether I had on the right kind of clothes and shoes. Would I fit in? I didn’t ever remember seeing so many white people in one place and being so close to them.

  On those first couple of days, my new classmates appeared friendly, pointing me toward classes when it was obvious I was lost. The first day I did see a familiar face, Mr. Faulk, my principal from West Side, who had been promoted to principal at Hall. He nodded politely when he saw me, but he didn’t speak—maybe because he looked as lost as I was.

  There were about thirty other black students in the class of ’73. About ten of them lived in the University Park section of town, an enclave of the city’s few black professionals. The rest came from the east side and were bused to Hall against their will. I knew some of them from my seventh-grade year at Booker. Needless to say, they were not nearly as happy to be at Hall as I was. The closing of Horace Mann was controversial within the black community. The school board wanted to close it permanently in 1970, but protests prevented it, and in a compromise the school board allowed the existing students at Horace Mann to finish there.

  The majority of the students who lived near Hall walked to school, though many had fancy new cars parked in the student parking lot and spent many lunch periods in the cars, smoking and eating McDonald’s. Hall High had a reputation for being a school for rich kids. Little Rock did have two private schools, Catholic High for Boys and Mount Saint Mary’s, which were both located close to Hall. Still, the majority of the city’s elite attended Hall.

  I remember how proud I was to attend Hall. I spent some of the money I had earned during the summer on pumpkin-orange-colored sweatshirts with “Hall High Warriors” emblazoned across my chest. I loved getting off the bus and walking in my neighborhood, the heart of Central territory, wearing my sweatshirt and bragging to my friends how Hall was the best school in the whole world. Of course, they would tease me and tell me how they couldn’t wait until Thanksgiving morning, when Central and Hall played the biggest football game of the year for the victory bell. It didn’t matter if one of the schools had lost all its games and the other was undefeated. All that mattered was who came out victorious on Thanksgiving Day.

  I wanted to feel a part of Hall High immediately and make new friends, so in a very bold move I decided to run for sophomore class representative on the student council, the equivalent of sophomore class president since it was the only elected office a sophomore could hold. I don’t think many people thought I had a chance of winning, but I thought if I met every single person in my class, I could prove them wrong. At least people would know who I was and I might make some new friends. At that time in my life I thought I might one day run for Congress, but now I realize it was the beginning of a period in my life where I attempted to overachieve so people wouldn’t notice the differences about me that I was beginning to hear loud and clear in my heart. Even though I wasn’t having sex with anyone, I thought about it all the time, and most of my thoughts were about men.

  Eleven people vied for the position of class representative, and most of them had been student council presidents or officers of their junior high or were the star football players and cheerleaders, the very people I was anxious to meet. All the candidates gave brief speeches to the sophomore class, and I felt proud when I ended my speech by saying, “Put the little X in the little box that will help put Lynn in the top spot.” The applause that followed was loud and comforting. I felt like a part of Hall High.

  Election Day arrived and I was feeling good because a lot of my new classmates had told me how much they loved my speech, how it was one of the best. When I asked a few of them if they were going to vote for me, many were noncommittal. One classmate, Ronnie Selle, told me flat out that he loved my speech but wasn’t going to vote for me because his girlfriend, Sherrie Kaufman, was running. I remembered Sherrie, a raven-haired beauty who was very nice to me at a candidates’ meeting. She is the one I would have voted for had I not been running.

  At the end of the day, Principal Faulk called all the candidates into his office and congratulated each of us on wonderful speeches and a well-run contest. I took a deep breath and clenched my fists as I looked around his office at the nervous faces of my competition. I prayed a silent prayer that I didn’t come in last.

  “There will be a runoff between the top two,” Mr. Faulk said. “Brian Sudderth received 112 votes.” That wasn’t a big surprise, since Brian was the favorite mainly because he had been president of Forest Heights Junior High, the feeder school down the hill from Hall.

  “And Lynn Harris received 156 votes. The runoff between Brian and Lynn will take place tomorrow morning in homeroom,” Mr. Faulk said.

  My heart was beating a mile a minute as everyone turned toward me with smiles and congratulations. I was on top of the world, like I had just won the presidency of the United States. I couldn’t remember being happier. A bespectacled Brian came over and gave me a hearty handshake, wishing me good luck. I thanked him and expressed a similar sentiment, though I really wanted to win.

  In one brief day, I became one of the most popular people at Hall High. I was on the verge of accomplishing something no black student had ever achieved there, or at any of the other majority white Arkansas schools, by winning a student government position.

  The night before the runoff, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I left home at six-thirty the next morning so I wouldn’t be late. I wanted to shake the hands of as many of my classmates as humanly possible as they entered the building.

  In my homeroom, my teacher asked everyone to give me a round of applause for doing so well in the election so far, but I detected the sound of impending doom in her voice, like I had done all I was going to do.

  As I prepared to mark my ballot, I looked around the classroom and noticed I was the only black student present. The other three black students in my homeroom were nowhere to be found. I naturally assumed they would be voting for me, even though they didn’t know me any better than Brian. I wondered if they were out in the student parking lot smoking, or skipping homeroom altogether.

  Around third period, which was usually at 11:00 A.M., my name and Brian’s were called over the intercom to report to the principal’s office. As I was heading toward the office, I saw one of the black girls from my homeroom walking into the building. She came over and asked me if it was too late to vote. When I asked where she had been, she told me that their regular bus had broken down. I told her I didn’t know if it was too late to vote but that she should ask our homeroom teacher.

  When I walked into the principal’s office, Brian was already sitting and having a friendly conversation. Mr. Faulk instructed me to take the seat next to Brian. When I sat down he began to study a piece of paper, which he held directly in front of his face like a shield.

  Mr. Faulk told us again how proud we should be and that it was a very close race. My stomach was dancing with nervous energy.

  “Lynn, you received 323 votes, and Brian, you received 326. Congratulations, Brian,” he said as he came from behind his desk to shake Brian’s hand. I fell into a daze as I looked at Brian and Mr. Faulk. I stared at every wrinkle on Weldon Faulk’s deeply lined face, and at Brian’s teeth, flashing like perfect rows of Chiclets gum. I started thinking: Three votes. I couldn’t believe it. Three lousy votes. Suddenly the face of the black girl from my homeroom came into my mind and
I started to recall how many black students rode that same bus. My thoughts were interrupted as Brian extended his hand to congratulate me on a good race.

  “You should be really proud,” he said.

  Proud … proud of losing? Mr. Faulk did say I had lost.

  “Thanks, and congratulations, Brian,” I said softly. I felt like crying, but I didn’t.

  Mr. Faulk told us to go back to our classes, and that he would announce the results over the loudspeaker during fourth period. He told Brian he could use his phone and call his parents and tell them the good news. He then looked at me and asked if I wanted to call my parents. Of course, parents meant two, and Mr. Faulk knew that I was being raised by my mother, alone.

  What would I tell my mother if I could call her? That I had lost an election that she didn’t even know I was running in? In fact, I hadn’t told anyone outside the confines of Hall High, not my mother, my sisters, or my neighborhood friends, because I didn’t want to be discouraged. How could I call my mother, who worked in a factory where no phone calls were allowed unless it was a matter of life or death?

  I told Mr. Faulk I didn’t want to call my mother but I would like to talk to him in private as Brian called his parents. When Brian left, Mr. Faulk again congratulated me on how well I had done and mentioned what a long way I had come since my suspension at West Side.

  The implication in his comments was clear—that I should be happy that so many white students had voted for me. When I told him that I thought at least twenty black students were late because of a broken-down bus and didn’t have a chance to vote in the election, he looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked me what I thought he should do.

  “I think they should be allowed to vote,” I said.

  My statement caught Mr. Faulk off guard, and he stood up from his chair and dismissively said that wouldn’t be fair. Brian had won, and besides, he had called and told his parents. Furthermore, if he allowed the colored students to vote now, I would win—and he simply couldn’t allow that.