What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

by E. Lynn Harris

A LITTLE MORE THAN FIVE hours later, I arrived at the U of A ready for a new start. I dreamed that it was going to be like those idyllic glimpses of college life I saw during halftime of football games on television. Everything looked peaceful and perfect, and the students looked happy. Every now and again there would be a couple of black students walking around the beautiful campus, carrying books and smiling.

  A black student attending the U of A was a big deal in the early seventies. Top black students in the state usually shunned the school because of its isolated location in northwest Arkansas. The school had a reputation for being harder on black students, with tougher grading standards and social hostility. It clearly was no easy place to be black.

  In 1973, Fayetteville was a sleepy town of about 30,000 whose population doubled when the school year started. Today it is one of the fastest-growing segments of the country, with headquarters for companies like Wal-Mart and Tyson Chicken nearby. The population now exceeds 50,000. A typical college town, Fayetteville has more restaurants and hotels than a town its size usually does, and on home football weekends, it magically becomes the second-largest city in Arkansas. It’s a beautiful city that spreads out over a chain of rolling hills, which become washed in brilliant colors in the autumn. Today it’s one of my favorite places in the world, but it didn’t start out that way.

  My first semester at the U of A, black students, as we were called then, made up less than 2 percent of the large student body. That didn’t bother me, since the ratio at Hall had been similar my first year. If I hadn’t attended Hall, I think I would have turned around and gone back home a few hours after arriving in Fayetteville. When I arrived at the campus, my heart skipped a beat of joy whenever I saw another person of color.

  WITHOUT DIRECT ADULT SUPERVISION, I quickly learned the price of freedom. I went to every party I was invited to or heard about, and went to classes only when they didn’t interfere with sleeping or watching All My Children and One Life to Live. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when my first-semester grades were absolutely terrible. My GPA was 1.30 out of a possible 4.00.

  My grades put my scholarships in jeopardy, and I was placed on academic probation. My mother threatened that I would come home and go to the local Philander Smith College if I didn’t get my act together. She also told me I wouldn’t be able to take my car back to campus. That was all I needed to hear. The second semester, I buckled down.

  I took twenty-one hours and my GPA was a 3.88. My only B came in swimming. Even though I had made such terrible grades the first semester, I was not intimidated by my courses. As I had proven to myself before, all I needed to do was focus. Since I didn’t have a romantic relationship, like most of the freshmen men and women I knew, it was very easy to do.

  I did find something to keep me company on weekends. During my freshman year I discovered liquor and the instant self-esteem it brought with it. On Fridays some of my friends and I would find someone who was of legal age in front of a liquor store to buy beer and rum for us. I drank from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night. I was falling in love with drinking and the boldness it gave me. With the liquor plus starch—french fries and hash browns every day—I had put on about forty pounds by the end of my freshman year and I was starting to feel like a regular guy. No longer was I the skinny kid. Black women on campus were starting to look at me as a potential partner. I was smart, and now I had muscles to hold on to during those body-glued slow dances.

  On the surface, life seemed more perfect than it had ever been. Being a college student gave me something I had desired for a long time: solid middle-class status. Attending the U of A turned out to be very lucrative from a financial standpoint. With my grants and scholarships, money was no longer a big issue for me. Tuition at the U of A was only two hundred dollars a semester for in-state students during the early seventies. In addition to the money I was receiving for my education, I was collecting Social Security benefits from my father’s death by simply filling out some forms and presenting my birth certificate.

  So I was able to afford designer clothes and a private dorm room, which I filled with albums, an elaborate stereo, a color television, and a portable icebox. With a new car and money in my pocket, most of the students I came in contact with assumed that I was from one of Little Rock’s middle-class families, and I didn’t bother to correct them.

  THE THREE HUNDRED OR SO black students formed a community within the university community. Everybody knew everybody, which had its good and bad points. Like most groups, there was division. The black students from small towns didn’t particularly care for the students from Little Rock. According to them, we were a bit arrogant. If you lived in a certain dorm, you were viewed a certain way. Reid Hall implied you were easy, and Humphreys Hall meant you were most likely a virgin looking for a husband. Of course, skin complexion and black fraternities and sororities offered more partitions. And then there were the jocks. During my first year at the U of A, thirty new black football players entered the university, a big jump from the previous year, when you could count the black players on one hand. Only a few were from Arkansas, with the majority coming from Texas. Still, on the weekend, everyone would manage to put aside their petty differences and party until the wee hours of the morning.

  I loved to dance, and when I drank I became an even better dancer, Mr. Soul Train of the Ozarks. Usually after a few songs, more people would be watching me dance than dancing themselves, and I think it was then that the rumors started that I might be a little different. That I was a punk, which was the terminology used to describe gay people back then.

  I first got wind of the rumor when a female friend told me what another woman had said after borrowing my car. I was now using my material possessions to gain friends. She told me a girl had said, “I don’t mind riding and driving his car, but you know he likes to hug and kiss, and it’s no telling where his lips have been.” The innuendo hurt me a great deal, but I never confronted her, because my source had made me promise not to. To make matters worse, the lady was always smiling in my face and asking me if I could either take her to the mall or let her drive my car, and I always acquiesced. My self-esteem was very low and I was constantly looking for approval; I wanted everybody on campus to like me, including those who spread hurtful rumors.

  Since the black population was so small, everybody knew who was sleeping with whom, unless you were like me and not sleeping with anyone. But after I dated a few campus beauties, the rumors seemed to stop.

  Still, dating women could not stop the first serious college crush I had on a man. I noticed him the first day I was on campus. I was in Barnhill fieldhouse, taking a placement examination, when he walked in with several football players. He was wearing skintight jeans, a red and blue football jacket, and a gray railroad conductor–type cap; he was a beautiful cider-brown man with a thick mustache. At this point in my life I didn’t have a single hair on my face, so I was impressed. Even though he was fully dressed, I thought he had one of the most beautiful bodies I had ever seen: broad shoulders, a small waist, and powerfully built bowlegs.

  He didn’t look in my direction and we didn’t make eye contact, but I remembered him and found myself staring at him at some of the weekend dances. I didn’t dare speak to him or inquire about his name.

  One evening I was visiting a female friend at Reid Hall when I passed the open door of two good friends, Virlean Lofton and Rita Stitt, whose laugher was drifting out into the hall. A deep-voiced man was talking and laughing with them. I stuck my head in the door and there he was, sitting between Virlean’s legs as she French-braided his short, coarse hair. Virlean invited me into the room. He looked up, smiled, but didn’t speak.

  I was exchanging campus chitchat with Virlean and Rita when suddenly Virlean said, “You know Elijah, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, fascinated by his thick black eyelashes and being so close to him. He gave me a black power handshake and said, “What’s going on?” His hands were enormous and
firm, so big that they swallowed my entire hand.

  Elijah and I talked for a few minutes. I found out he wasn’t from Arkansas or Texas like most of the football players, but from a place called Junction City, Kansas. When I asked him where that was, he told me near Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. As I talked to Elijah, I became completely mesmerized by his unmistakable maleness. He didn’t carry himself like an eighteen-year-old.

  I tried not to stare at Elijah as Virlean put the finishing touches on his braids. She had a small jar of Afro Sheen and was dabbing it on the rows in between Elijah’s braids. To avoid staring at him, I began to make small talk with Rita, who was busy studying. I finally excused myself, and later that night in my dorm room I couldn’t study or sleep because I was thinking about Elijah. My insides felt the way they did the first time I had seen Rose Crater. One big problem: Elijah wasn’t a girl, and I knew I shouldn’t be feeling this way.

  ELIJAH AND I BECAME SOMEWHAT of an odd couple. On the surface there was no real reason for the two of us to become close friends. After my stellar academic performance during my second semester, I had developed a reputation as a brain. With Elijah’s performance on the football field and in many of the dorm rooms of several good-looking girls, he was viewed as a stud and a dumb jock.

  I looked at him differently. Elijah became my friend and protector. I became his friend and personal tutor, but secretly I wanted more. I never shared my true feelings, partly because I was consumed with fear and desire. The fear that if I told Elijah how I really felt I would lose his friendship, and become a laughingstock on campus, was balanced by the desire to have him protect me for the rest of my life. Still, I had a hard time understanding why this man made my palms sweat with his mere presence.

  Whatever he asked me to do, I would do without even thinking about how it looked. I always told him where I could be reached. If he called, I would leave wherever I was. Once I even left the dorm room of one of the most beautiful women on campus, who was romantically interested in me. But Elijah was the same way with me. One night I had a flat tire on one of Fayetteville’s darkest roads right outside of campus. I called Elijah, and he risked a curfew violation to come and change my tire.

  Elijah and I were always rescuing each other from various situations. I would help him study for a test, or call him when he wanted to get away from his steady girlfriend for a booty call with another young lady who had captured his roving eye. When I moved into my first off-campus apartment, with three guys from Forrest City, Arkansas, I quickly decided I wanted to move out because every discussion about food and television viewing was a 3–1 vote, and I was always at a disadvantage. It didn’t matter that most of the electronics were mine. I knew I never should have moved in with these guys, because I knew only one of them well. When I told them I was moving out, they told me I couldn’t.

  When I found a new apartment where I could live alone, Elijah showed up and stood by the front door with his massive arms folded, with a Don’t fuck with me look as I moved my boxes and appliances into my car. The roommates didn’t say a word. Elijah ended up spending the first night with me at my new apartment, sleeping at the foot of my bed because I expressed concern that my former roommates might retaliate. That wasn’t really the truth, but nothing physical happened between us.

  I had decided that if an advance was going to be made, Elijah would have to make it. I still had no idea of how to approach a man, and I wasn’t comfortable with women either. Women in college were much more aggressive than those in high school.

  There were so many things I loved and admired about Elijah. He had an air of toughness and street smarts about him, having practically raised himself with the help of his elderly grandfather. He also had a gentle side that sometimes revealed itself very easily. When I look back, I realize that he was the first black male who was as close a friend to me as Gessler.

  And as with Gessler, our friendship remained strong and platonic throughout my college years, while my desire for men would find a new subject almost every semester. After my sophomore year, we didn’t spend as much time with each other, because football and track took up a lot of his time and I was becoming involved in school activities and other crushes. Still, it was comforting to know Elijah was always only a phone call away.

  I WAS LEARNING MORE THAN academics at the U of A. I was fine-tuning my skills of becoming a chameleon, or as my mother might say, “a very good liar.” I lied because the truth about my background wasn’t good enough. Attending Hall benefitted me in that I was able to move comfortably between the worlds of my white classmates at school and back home with my black peers. I lied about not only my sexuality but about almost everything else as well. I told so many mistruths that it became hard to remember what I’d said originally.

  Was my father a lawyer, or a judge who had died tragically? Was my alleged girlfriend a student at the University of Missouri or Stephens College? Did I live in University Park or Pulaski Heights? None of my classmates ever questioned me extensively, and assumed I was telling the truth.

  I was asked to be a part of some of the university’s lily-white organizations, like Cardinal XX, an honorary society for the top twenty freshmen men, Phi Eta Sigma, and the Arkansas Traveler student newspaper and Razorback yearbook.

  I was also following a pattern of falling for heterosexual men who befriended me and loved me like a brother. The only problem was that I was no longer looking for brotherly love. During my sophomore year, I had flipped for Hugh Perry Watson, a tall, good-looking, waffle-brown freshman from El Dorado, Arkansas. We met at one of the girls’ dorms and later at Borough Commons, one of the huge cafeterias on campus, where a lot of black students would gather for meals.

  Over lunch I discovered that Hugh was easy to talk to. We found we had a lot in common besides being the only boys in a family of girls. We both liked the Isley Brothers, and loved dancing and watching sports.

  The one difference I took note of was our family makeup. Hugh’s mother and father were still married, and his father, a high school principal, played an important part in all of his decisions. It seemed that Hugh didn’t make a single decision without discussing it with his father. At first I admired their close relationship, but later I became envious of it.

  With Hugh, and unlike with Elijah, I was in charge of the friendship. He was such a kind, gentle person and I was certain he would be the love of my life, because he seemed to need me. We became roommates and would spend nights in our dorm room with matching bedspreads, talking about life after Fayetteville. We planned to be in each other’s wedding and there for the birth of our first children. I told Hugh about Gessler and how I wanted the two of them to meet. Despite my friendships with Hugh and Elijah, Gessler remained a close friend. We talked on the phone often, but the socialization of the campus prevented us from spending a great deal of time together. Gessler lived in the Phi Delta Theta house and was an officer, so he had a new set of friends and obligations. I understood, because there were times when I found comfort in being around my own kind. Besides, I didn’t want anyone to call me an Uncle Tom any more than I wanted to be called a punk. Black students who had a lot of white friends were usually classified as Uncle Toms, though black men who dated white women were not.

  I trusted Hugh, but I never told him that I might be gay or that I was harboring a romantic interest in him. I figured if it was supposed to happen, Hugh would know also. Our friendship was wonderful but confusing.

  I told him about my true economic station in life, something I privately vowed to never tell anyone I met at the university. I was practically forced to do so halfway to Little Rock one weekend. Hugh had been bugging me to take him home with me. I guess he wanted to see what the big brick homes at University Park looked like on the inside.

  Not surprisingly, my confession to Hugh didn’t affect his feelings about me in any way. He had a great time at my house and didn’t complain about having to share the small pullout sofa. My sisters and mother loved
him.

  Months later, I visited Hugh’s home, and it seemed that every day we became closer. Neither of us made a move without talking it over with the other. We had become so close that I didn’t mind that he was falling in love with the young lady he had taken to his high school prom, who also attended the university. I figured one day he would realize he was going to spend the rest of his life with me and drop her the moment we left Fayetteville.

  I guess for someone looking in from the outside, the relationship might have appeared strange, though it was purely innocent. I couldn’t admit to Hugh that I was gay or bisexual, because I hadn’t completely admitted it to myself. Every time I thought about sex with a man, I recalled my encounter with the Shaft psycho and I knew being either gay or bisexual was not a consideration for a black man in Fayetteville or anywhere else in Arkansas.

  One weekend we drove to El Dorado to get Hugh’s winter clothes, and the plan was not to stay too long. We stayed only one night, a Saturday. His family, especially his father and mother, was extremely nice to me. I thought the trip and introduction had gone fine, but when I returned to school for the spring semester after the holiday break, all of Hugh’s belongings were gone from our room. His top bunk had been stripped of the sheets. I looked in his closet and his clothes, books, and albums he’d left during the break were also gone. There was no indication that Hugh and I had ever shared a room.

  I didn’t know what had happened, and I was so stunned that I didn’t know what to do. During the Christmas break, I had talked with Hugh almost daily from Atlanta, where I was staying with my Aunt Gee and Uncle Charles. There’d been no mention of his moving out or that he was having any problems with me or our friendship. Then I thought maybe something terrible had happened to him, that he’d been in a car accident.

  I immediately picked up the phone and dialed Hugh’s number in El Dorado. His father answered and told me that Hugh was back at school. He was very short with me, so I didn’t quiz him on Hugh’s whereabouts. When I hung up I thought maybe Hugh had gotten an off-campus apartment with his girlfriend and didn’t know how to tell me. I knew they had spent a lot of time together over the holidays.