When Uncle Root drove Belle back to campus, she told her roommate that she’d experienced a loss in the family, and she didn’t really want to talk about it. She repeated this every time Marie brought up the subject. She was numb, but when Geoff met her on the steps the next morning, Belle found that she had missed him. He looked very frazzled but relieved, and on the walk to the library, she looked around, making sure no one was close. Then Belle told Geoff what had happened to her brother. That she wasn’t ashamed of him, but she knew what the campus gossips would make of Roscoe’s life, if they discovered that he’d died on the chain gang.
And her brother had been more than a criminal. He’d been a nice young man, respectful of his mother and （mostly） helpful to his father in the fields. He’d been the best big brother ever, too, so protective and sweet. Nobody ever messed with Belle, because they knew Roscoe didn’t play about his baby sister. Seven girls had shown up to his funeral—two of them married with children—and cried as if their hearts were broken, but that wouldn’t matter to these snobs on campus, if they found out Roscoe had been on the chain gang.
“So please don’t tell anybody,” she said.
“I would never do that. You can always trust me,” Geoff said, and the earnestness in his large brown eyes moved her. She asked, could they go for a drive somewhere that night? She’d meet him at his car. Throughout the day, she didn’t make any plans. She only wanted to feel something other than sadness. That’s what she knew, as she watched for the sun to give way to darkness, and she walked over to the male students’ parking lot. Geoff was waiting for her, and when he paid the blackmail fee to the guard at the gate, she wasn’t embarrassed.
Geoff drove his Seville to the same field where Stanley had tried to take advantage of her, but he was tender as a baby when he kissed her. After seconds, he tried to stop, but she told him, keep on. Please don’t stop, and she leaned against the baby-blue front seat, took Geoff’s hand, and placed it underneath her sweater, and inside her bra. His hand was so warm. So lovely as it found her skin and touched it to fire. She pushed the hand away, but only for a moment, because she found that she wanted him to put it someplace else. She really wanted that, and she told him again, don’t stop, so he didn’t.
*
Belle’s dream told her that she was pregnant before her body did. She was rocking the most gorgeous brown baby she ever had seen. A little girl whose arms, thighs, and belly were ringed with fat. The little girl looked so much like her own mother that Belle was sure that she belonged to Miss Rose, who appeared in the dream. But when Belle tried to give the baby back to her mother, the little girl screamed until Belle put her to the breast that was instantly exposed. When she awoke, she was confused. She’d never been a dreamer, like her grandmother Pearl, who was known for the visions that either predicted or indicted.
It took time for Belle to catch on that the dream-baby was inside her. Miss Rose always had tracked her cycle, asking every month, had she seen the moon? There was no morning sickness, either, no weight gain, only full breasts. By that time, she’d received her letter that she had been accepted into Columbia’s Master of Arts program. Uncle Root had told her he already had the money saved for her tuition, and he’d located a lady in Harlem who kept a respectable boardinghouse.
Belle had plans for her life, and so she was angry. Not at Geoff but with her brother. If Roscoe hadn’t killed that man, he wouldn’t have been sent away to the chain gang. If he’d only not sassed that guard and been shot. If he hadn’t been dead and lying stiff and powdered in his coffin, Belle wouldn’t have been at the mercy of her grief and she wouldn’t have given in to Geoff.
Or rather, Belle had given in to herself, for Geoff had kept asking her until the moment he had slipped inside her, was she absolutely sure? Was he being a gentleman? And though there had been pain that first time and a bit of blood in her panties that evening when he returned her to her dorm after she had smoothed her hair and clothing—the second and third and fourth times had been free of everything except a glorious, wet heat. She’d calmed down enough after those few days to tell Geoff they should stop, and though he was disappointed—anybody could see that—he quickly agreed. He told her he hadn’t meant to take advantage.
Belle was not only angry at her dead brother, she was angry at herself. Another, braver girl would be trying to collect money, the five hundred dollars that the gossips whispered it would take for a girl to pay a certain Negro doctor in Atlanta who could get rid of a baby. According to those gossips, the doctor was sage and clear, but Belle kept remembering the girl at her high school who had bled to death from a botched abortion. It had been the year that Miss Rose had pulled Belle close, trying to protect her daughter; as cranky as Miss Rose had been, she was a kind woman at her core. More than that, a godly woman who did not believe in speaking ill of the dead. She told Belle, that girl should have tried a different home remedy before the pregnancy took hold. Like drinking a tea made from wild carrot seeds, right after you lay with a man. Or ginger root tea, or even the more dangerous pokeberry wine, which only the truly desperate employed. The girl hadn’t even consulted one of the euphemistic elixirs sold at the dime store that “helped to unblock menses” or “eased women’s complaints.” Instead, Belle’s high school classmate had stuck a crochet needle inside her, which had caused her to bleed but didn’t get rid of the pregnancy. And the girl had died from an infection.