The day he asked Belle to go steady was the first time they kissed, on Violet’s bench by the side of the library. If someone really wanted to spy, they could, but the bench that was named for Adeline Routledge’s daughter was sheltered by a canopy of tall bushes. When Geoff leaned over, asking, could he have a kiss, Belle didn’t expect much. There had been a boy in seventh grade who’d kissed her, but that had been wet and uninspiring, so she was surprised by the feeling that took her. She felt like she was drunk on her daddy’s jar of moonshine, and she put her hand up to Geoff’s cheek, then the back of his neck. She opened her mouth, letting her tongue travel to his.
He was the first to stop. There was a catch to his breath as he said, gee, she was wonderful. He hoped he wasn’t being ungentlemanly, and Belle told him, no, not at all. She didn’t know how to ask for more kisses, to tell him she wasn’t satisfied with those few seconds. But she didn’t want to be forward, so she folded her hands in her lap. He sighed, and then stood, reaching for her books. Halfway back to the dorm, he began to recite a poem by Langston Hughes, about Negro girls of various, beautiful shades, like chocolate.
“Listen to you!” She giggled. “You are something else.”
“You bring it out in me.” He jumped a bit off the ground. “You make me so happy, Belle.”
They kissed the next day, and every day afterward, until it was time for the Christmas break. Before Geoff drove home for the holidays, he asked for her address, and until the break was over, she received long letters from him nearly every day. And when they returned to campus, there were more kisses on Violet’s bench outside the library, and if Belle wasn’t completely satisfied with necking a few minutes, she told herself, her restraint was for a purpose. She couldn’t lose control, because Geoff might be nice but there was no way a boy that looked like he did could bring home somebody who looked like her. He was not her great-uncle Root, a pale-skinned man who had married a dark brown woman and adored her. No man was as good as her great-uncle—not even her daddy—and that was fine, because Belle was only having some fun until she graduated. But not too much fun. She didn’t need to get pregnant; she had plans for her life.
That would have settled things, if it hadn’t been for her brother Roscoe. He changed the entire course of her life, the night that Roscoe let his blood get up. That famous temper of his reared, even behind the bars of the regional prison where he was serving twenty years when Roscoe sassed a guard there. At least that’s what the warden told Miss Rose and Hosea when they went to pick up their oldest son’s body.
In five years, when one of Roscoe’s friends on the chain gang was released, he’d tell the Driskells that the guard had tried something with Roscoe. Something like what a man wanted to do with a woman. He wouldn’t say exactly what it was—not in front of Miss Rose—but the friend had hitchhiked to the farm of Roscoe’s parents because he felt like he owed them something. After the friend sat awhile and drank some sweet tea and ate through the generously loaded plate that Miss Rose had prepared, Hosea Driskell gave him a ride to Madison. The friend had traveled a good distance, in order to do right by Roscoe, and the father wasn’t gone let somebody who’d offered a powerful kindness wear out his shoe leather.
But that truth given by Roscoe’s friend was five years away, and thus, when the warden told the Driskells they could pick up their son’s bullet-ridden body, the warden didn’t tell them he was sorry for their loss, only that if they hadn’t shown in forty-eight hours, he would have buried their son in an unmarked grave. That was on a Wednesday afternoon.
Early Thursday morning, Miss Rose went into town to the home of Cordelia Pinchard Rice. She told Cordelia’s maid what happened, and when the maid showed her into the front room （because Cordelia was “good white folks,” a liberal type of lady）， Miss Rose asked if she could make a long-distance phone call to Routledge College. They didn’t have no phone out in the country. Cordelia said, of course, and so Miss Rose left an emergency message for Uncle Root with the campus operator, and after he received the message and called Miss Rose back, he walked over to the refectory and found his niece at a table, eating lunch with Geoff and Marie.
He wouldn’t tell Belle what was wrong, only that they were driving to Chicasetta right away, and he ignored Belle’s questions on the journey. It wasn’t until he pulled up in front of the house of her parents that he cautioned her to brace herself, and told her what had happened. And then, Uncle Root held her as she screamed and cried. She smeared cocoa powder on the front of his clean white shirt, but he didn’t complain. The funeral was held four days after that, and Mr. Cruddup, the family mortician, somehow made Roscoe look completely natural; that was remarked upon by those who attended the service at Red Mound Church. Three of those days, Belle would not remember, only that when her memory returned, she was coming to at her brother’s funeral. She fainted again, and when she woke up, her mother was sitting on the side of her bed. Belle told her mother everything had changed. She wasn’t going back to college. She would stay at home and be a beautician, but Miss Rose set her lips: she had waited too long to see her baby girl become a schoolteacher and she won’t gone be disappointed. She needed something to look forward to, and she held Belle, patting her daughter’s back. She kissed the top of the girl’s head, as she hadn’t since Belle had been very little.