The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  “I don’t think she is telling the truth,” Tibby Brewster asserted from the back row. Today he was wearing a bright green golf shirt with his khakis. His curly hair was freshly clipped. His lips were set in a determined line. “How could she be? Her master owned her; that was a legal and economic reality. He had a right to rape her.” At the collective gasp that arose from the class, he held up his hand. “Hey, wait a minute. I’m not saying it was morally right. But it was an economic and legal fact: She was his property. He could do whatever he wanted with her, and the law sanctioned it. She says she resisted him, but I don’t believe it. How could she? The law was on his side. And would it have even been rape?”

  “Damn right it would have been rape.” Emily Hannon’s blond, shoulder-length hair bobbed with indignation. “Moral law supersedes civil law absolutely. And rape is a violation of the implicit moral right of each person to the integrity of his or her own body.”

  “Yeah, Brewster,” Steve Nagler affirmed, “haven’t you ever heard of individual moral responsibility?”

  In the heated debate that followed, Tibby Two was roundly chastised. Surprisingly, Shamega Gilfoyle, the only black student in the class, sat mutely through the discussion. And I could see why; it must be exhausting to constantly be the sole representative of your race in a class at a cushy, white institution like Enfield. Still, this silence wasn’t at all like Shamega. And neither was the unreadable expression in her dark eyes as the furor raged around her. Poor kid, I thought. I remembered the two years I’d spent as a scholarship student at Smith College; I’d gotten sick of being the token working-class student. In my junior year, I recalled, I’d infuriated one professor by calling Huck Finn a bourgeois fantasy of boyhood, totally out of touch with the hard realities of degradation, illiteracy, and homelessness that actual poverty visited on disadvantaged children. It was the only course I ever got less than an A in, and after that I’d learned to keep my mouth shut. Academics don’t like to have their dream lives intruded upon.

  I concluded the class discussion of Jacobs’s Incidents by stressing the author’s courage. “It’s almost as if we have a social contract to be silent about rape. No one wants to talk about it; no one wants to hear about it. And in the 1800’s, things were even worse; sex of every kind was barred from literary expression. Harriet Jacobs was breaking a powerful code of concealment and risking her hard-won identity as a respectable woman in recounting her sexual experience.” The dry abstractions didn’t even begin to summarize the painful dilemma faced by a former slave telling her story to a white audience.

  Shamega’s silence nagged at me, and I tried to catch up with her, but she vanished the moment class let out.

  Tony and I were making love in the big bed in the Upper West Side apartment I’d left when I took the job at Enfield. He had just kissed the back of my neck so sweetly it gave me shivers, when I heard the baby cry. I rolled to the edge of the bed, reached over to the cradle, and pulled back the hand-knit lavender blanket. The frantic screams turned into the loud clamor of a telephone, and I woke from the luscious dream. I fumbled for the light, glanced at the green numbers on the bedside clock: 11:52 P.M. What the hell? The phone rang again; I grabbed it.

  “Professor Pelletier?” The voice coming over the line was small and frightened. “Professor Pelletier, you said I should call you if I was having any problem with … well … with … with anyone in the class.…”

  “What? Who?” I sat up in bed, blinking in the glare of the lamp. “Shamega? Is that you?”

  “He was in my room.”

  “What?”

  “He was in my room at least I think it was him I was coming home from work—the late shift—and the room was dark and I turned on the light—” She was jumbling it all together as if separate sentences would be too difficult to articulate. “But there was no light just the glow from the hall and someone threw me on the bed and before I could see who it was he had disappeared down the hall and …”

  “Was it—Tibby Brewster?” I remembered the open antagonism between Shamega and my troublesome student.

  “I don’t know.” There was silence again on the other end of the line. Then she whispered, “I think so.”

  “Shamega, did you call Security?”

  “No! And I’m not going to—”

  “You must—”

  “No. No, I can’t—”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t.” She was crying now. “Look, I shouldn’t have bothered you. He didn’t hurt me. He just scared me. I’ll be all right. I’m sorry I woke you. Just forget I called.”

  “Shamega—don’t hang up. Don’t Hang. Up. Shamega!—” But she was gone.

  I was already out of bed, stripping off the extra-large Enfield T-shirt I sleep in. As I slipped into jeans and a sweatshirt, I rifled through my desk for the Enfield College Directory. Shamega answered her phone on the eighth ring, just as I bent to tie the laces of my battered white Nikes. At least I assumed it was Shamega; she didn’t say anything, but I could hear her frightened breathing.

  “Shamega, it’s Karen Pelletier—”

  “I am not calling Security.” Each word was a small, hard fist.

  “Okay. Okay. Listen, stay in your room. I’ll come there. We need to talk.”

  “No!”

  “No? Then why did you call me?”

  “I mean, no, don’t come to the dorm. The guard would have to let you in, and I don’t want him to know. I’ll meet you, somewhere—On the library steps, okay?”

  Although an unseasonable daytime warmth had lingered through the final week of March and well into April, the night air felt cold as I belted myself into the driver’s seat. I wasn’t optimistic about the permanence of spring. This was New England, and each morning I checked the crocuses that had poked their purple and gold heads through the melting piles of gray snow, each time expecting to find the perky flowers frozen into limp clumps of unidentifiable plant matter. I was shivering in my wool jacket as I turned the key in the ignition, and I was absolutely certain the poor, naked flowers would be dead by morning.

  It was after midnight, and the back roads leading to Enfield from my house in the country were empty of traffic. Still, after I braked for the first deer, a young skittish buck with budding horns, I kept to a reasonable speed. I would get to the campus in twenty minutes. It was the best I could do. And I couldn’t help feeling a little resentful. Why me? There were counselors at the school. Why hadn’t Shamega called one of them? Or the dean? Or a friend? Or her parents?

  English teachers—female English teachers, in particular—tend to be recruited as unofficial counselors in a goodly percentage of student crises. It has something to do with all that raw literary emotion we handle so coolly every day. I remembered Harriet Jacobs’s It pains me to tell you of it and the class discussion that very morning. Then the memory of Shamega’s haunted eyes flashed into my mind.

  Any residual resentment vanished the moment I set eyes on Shamega. She sat shivering on the library’s top step, huddled against the base of a two-story-high marble pillar. Wearing only a sweatshirt and baggy pants, she looked even smaller and more insubstantial than normal. Her eyes, though, seemed twice their usual size—like those of the frightened deer I’d just seen. I sat and put my arm around her shoulder. “Tell me about it.”

  “I told you everything that happened. Really. I worked the late shift—at Starbucks—and took the last bus home. The dorm was quiet when I got in, no one in the hall—and I don’t have a roommate. I opened the door and reached for the light, and he grabbed me and threw me. Then he was gone. It was so unexpected, and over so quick. By the time I got to the door, there was no one in the hall.”

  “The guard would know if there was an intruder—”

  “It wasn’t an intruder. Professor, there’s at least as many men as women in my dorm. It could have been anyone.”

  “But you think it was—”

  “Yes. He lives in my dorm.”

  “Then, why�
�”

  She clutched my arm. “Shhhh!” Then she whispered, “Do you see someone over there?”

  “Where?”

  “There.” She pointed toward Dickinson Hall, the boxy brick building that houses the English Department.

  Pools of light surrounded the campus buildings and swam with shadows as the tight red buds of early spring shook in the cold night wind. I peered through the gloom. Between the lighted areas, random blocks of darkness hid anything a midnight imagination could conceive. I saw nothing but the usual goblins.

  Shamega shuddered. I stood up and pulled her to her feet. “Come on,” I ordered crisply. “We’re in full view here—if anybody is there. And without a coat, you must be freezing. Listen, neither of us wants you to go back to the dorm. Do you have a friend you could stay with?”

  She shuddered again, shook her head. No friends. Please.

  “Okay,” I said, “then we’ve got two options. Either we can inform Security, or you can come home with me.”

  All the way home, in spite of the heat pouring into the interior of the car, Shamega shivered. Since she wouldn’t talk, I did. I told her all about my daughter, how Amanda was in her sophomore year, studying premed, which made me happy, because she used to say she wanted to study criminal science, and I didn’t want her to be a cop, because I had lived with one for years and it was a really hard life, and dangerous, and how she was on the chess team at Georgetown, which really surprised me because in high school she had been the captain of the basketball team and I’d expected her to play for the college, and how she had come home at Thanksgiving her freshman year with magenta hair. And on and on. I was talking to keep the silence at bay. If I were Shamega, I would have detested my daughter by the time we got to my house. But she didn’t seem to. Amanda’s funky room, with its lime walls, black curtains, and pro-choice posters intrigued her—especially the music collection.

  “Cool,” she said, browsing through the racks of cassette tapes. “Okay if I listen?”

  “Sure.” I tossed her a flannel nightshirt of Amanda’s. “Enjoy.” I turned and headed for my own room. It was two A.M. If Shamega didn’t need me to play Mother Confessor, that was cool, too; maybe I could get a few hours sleep.

  “Professor Pelletier?”

  I pivoted in the hallway. “Yes?” My eyes had already begun to droop.

  “You know I appreciate your help. I just have a few things to think about.”

  “I know you do.” I’d known a great many young women over the past few years—Amanda, her friends, and scores of students—and I was fairly well versed in the late-adolescent female psyche.

  Through the wall from my daughter’s bedroom I could hear the melancholy strains of R.E.M. God, I was thankful I wasn’t that young anymore.

  When I woke at eight, Shamega was making pancakes in my kitchen. She had sliced a banana and was laying a banana spiral in each large cake. I poured coffee and sat at the round oak table.

  Shamega set a plate of the thick browned cakes in front of me, then tucked into her own. She seemed calmer,

  “So?” I asked. I cautiously examined the plate in front of me. College students tend to be loose cannons in the kitchen, but these pancakes looked good. I spread butter, drizzled syrup. Suddenly I was ravenous.

  “So,” she replied. “Thank you. This was just what I needed—a real home and a real kitchen.” Her smile was wan, but resolute. Then she continued, “You know what I want to do with my life?”

  “What?” I cut a wedge of pancake and nibbled. Then, not believing what I was tasting, I forked the entire bite down and reached for another. These were the best pancakes I’d eaten in my entire life. I couldn’t believe how good they were. I hefted my coffee cup and glanced over at Shamega.

  “Cook.”

  I knew it. “I’m not surprised. These pancakes are terrific.”

  She smiled hesitantly. “Thanks. So, you think that’s okay? I mean—to cook? To cook for a living? My folks would freak out, you know. They sacrificed so much to send me to this expensive school. And my grandfather spent his life flipping burgers in a greasy spoon. They don’t want that for me.”

  “Well, of course they don’t. But have you ever talked to them about a culinary institute?”

  “No. No, I haven’t. Two things they’ve always made clear to me: I have to marry black, and I have to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a professor. Uplift the race, you know.”

  “You could talk to them.” I wiped up the last of the syrup with the last of the pancakes. “There’s nothing more uplifting than great food. Are there any more of these?”

  She jumped up, retrieved a plate of golden cakes from the oven, where she’d been keeping them warm. We each helped ourselves to another cake. “Yeah, I could—I could talk to them, couldn’t I?” She looked thoughtful for a moment. Then she changed the subject.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea, Professor Pelletier. My parents are good people. And one of the things they taught me was never to be a victim. So, in my senior year of high school, when I was raped by two members of the basketball team …” She tried for a casual tone, but my exclamation of horror threw her off just a little.

  “Shamega!”

  She raised both hands, palms outward. “Just let me tell this, okay?”

  “Okay. But, oh, Shamega …” I was no longer hungry. I laid the fork and knife crosswise on my plate.

  “When I was raped, I decided not to be a victim. I reported the rape, I pressed charges, we went to court.” She paused as she spread butter.

  “And?”

  “And—I lost.” She put her knife down, but neglected to pick up the fork. “Insufficient evidence of resistance. White boys, black girl. Young woman not a virgin to begin with. Young men with promising lives ahead of them. One’s now at Harvard; one’s at Brown.” Shamega finished her coffee, then pushed her plate away.

  “I know it’s a cliché, but it was like being raped all over again. Once in Bobby’s living room, once in my hometown’s courtroom. And the second time was almost worse, because it was so public. And last night when … whoever it was … grabbed me, it felt as if it were happening a third time. That I was being violated again. That’s why I got so hysterical. I won’t go through that again. The cops weren’t so bad. But the lawyers …” She shuddered. “And the jury. And the looks from my classmates …”

  So this was why Shamega had looked so distressed in class yesterday; the discussion of rape was too painfully close to her own experience. And this must be why she’d called me, instead of a counselor. I’d talked with some understanding about rape; she knew she could trust me.

  Shamega cleared dishes from the table, and scraped the uneaten cakes into the garbage. I ran hot water into the sink, squirted the dish soap. This old house doesn’t have a dishwasher. I really should move somewhere more civilized. With my hands deep in soapsuds, I pondered Shamega’s dilemma. Enfield was a small campus, and gossip spread like wildfire. If she reported an intruder in her room, it would be public knowledge by dinnertime. I understood her desire to keep it quiet. On the other hand, if there was any danger of it happening again … I really didn’t know how to advise her.

  “I didn’t tell you,” she said, “but he got into my underwear.”

  “What?”

  “I mean he got into my drawers.”

  “What!”

  “My dresser drawers, I mean.”

  “Oh …”

  “There was underwear thrown all over the room—and I think some of it was missing.”

  She dried my cast-iron griddle, then rubbed vegetable oil onto it with a paper towel. I watched, fascinated. I didn’t know you were supposed to do that.

  “If it is Tibby Brewster, I think it’s a sex thing, not a race thing. But it’s so odd, Professor. This—thing—he’s got with me … this fixation, or whatever it is, it’s something sort of new.”

  “What do you mean, new?”

  “Well, I was in classes with him last year, and he never paid any
attention to me. It was like, you know, I didn’t even exist for him. It’s like that with some white people. They see black, then they don’t see anything else. And that was fine by me; I never had the slightest desire to attract the attentions of Thibault Brewster the Second. And I had an Irish poetry course with him in the fall. Same thing for most of the semester: I didn’t exist. Then—” She paused to pour a last cup of coffee. “Then we come back from Thanksgiving vacation and suddenly I’m visible; he can’t take his eyes off me. Since then he’s made it clear—Well …”

  I slid the glass pot into the soapy water and scrubbed it in silence. Shamega took it from the drainer and spoke. “The kind that’s into underwear, Professor: You can imagine. But I don’t think Tibby’s really dangerous. It was just that he didn’t expect me to be there—in my room; I surprised him, and he reacted. But he didn’t attack me.”

  “Shamega …” I admired this young woman’s independence and courage, but, even more, I wanted her to be safe.

  “I trust you, Professor. I trust you to keep this to yourself.” She folded the dish towel and hung it on the wooden rack. “Please?” Her brown eyes implored me.

  I sighed. “Okay. But on two conditions: one—that you’ll let me know if there’s any more trouble, and two—if it goes any further you’ll talk to Earlene Johnson.”

  “That sounds fair.” Shamega flashed me a bright smile. “Okay. And thanks. Thanks for bringing me home with you last night, and thanks for the use of your kitchen. And by the way, Professor Pelletier, you really need to do something about your cookware. All that cheap, thin-bottomed stuff … How do you ever get a decent sear on anything?”