“Hey, beautiful lady, what you doing?” Pat asked.
I dropped the breast on the floor. “Ooh! You scared me!”
He picked the chicken up, blew on it and bit into it.
“Pat!”
“Girl, whatever. God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt. Ooh, this breast is so good and juicy. Mmm.”
He smacked his lips loudly. Two more big bites, and he was finished. Then he looked around at the mess in the kitchen. The flour on the counter. The splotches of grease on the stove top. The mound of dirty dishes in the sink. He threw out the chicken bone and told me he’d be right back. When he returned, a large bath towel was tucked into the front of his waistband. He put the stopper in the sink and turned on the faucet. He asked, where was the dishwashing liquid?
*
When it came to men, Keisha was even more careful than Roz and me. The flesh was weak. Real weak, and the Devil stayed wide awake, she insisted. She didn’t date or even talk to young men for more than a few seconds at a time. And the long dresses she wore announced her disinterest in anybody touching her, if they could even get past the waist-high panties, long-line girdle, full slip, and pantyhose she wore underneath those dresses, throughout every season.
But in April of our sophomore year, Keisha opened up to Roz and me. She told us she had something on her spirit she wanted to talk about. Keisha always had been honest with us about her poverty, that she’d grown up in the projects, and was on a full scholarship. She had no shame over that, but that night over cherry soda and ribs in our room, she confided that she wasn’t truly a virgin. A cousin of hers had raped her when she was nine. Keisha had shown her mother the blood in her panties, but she was spanked for lying. Her mother told her that her period was coming in early. Puberty was turning her fast, and that’s why she was musty, and making up lies on her own kin. Keisha’s mother gave her cream deodorant to use and kept leaving her with the cousin to babysit, but then, just when Keisha lost hope, Jesus had appeared to Keisha in her dreams—the same dream for seven nights in a row—telling her she would be redeemed, and on the eighth day, the cousin was killed in a car accident, his body badly cut up by the impact of his going through the windshield, his penis and testicles mangled.
Her cousin’s death was Keisha’s sign to dedicate her life to the Lord and she was glad about that. Still the Dirty Thirty list hurt her. Because even if Keisha’s name wasn’t on a piece of paper—and even if she’d only been a little girl—she still felt nasty, no matter how hard she prayed. It was like her cousin had left all his filth behind.
“Do y’all think I’m bad, ’cause of what happened to me?” Keisha asked. “I tried so hard to be a good girl! I promise I did.”
I held her as she wept. I told her she was as good as any person could get, and for once, Keisha didn’t chastise Roz for cursing, for calling her cousin a low-down motherfucker. Roz told us that’s why she treated men so indifferently. All they could do is pay her bills, because they weren’t worth a damn. Doing this kind of shit to kids, and I was quiet. I held Keisha and smoothed her hair, hoping neither one of my friends would ask, had anything bad like that ever happened to me? I didn’t want them to look at me differently. I wasn’t religious like Keisha was, pledging herself to God.
A few days later, when the Dirty Thirty list appeared under our door that April morning, I couldn’t even look at it. But Roz snatched up the list. She called the names out loud. None of us were on the list, but there were five young women in our dorm who were listed. Beside each name were the names of the brothers she’d slept with.
Other colleges had their own infamous lists, but they allowed those who smeared reputations to remain anonymous. At Routledge, there was an honor code to the Dirty Thirty: if a brother wanted to drop a tarnished dime on a young woman, he had to give his name, either his government name or his fraternity moniker, which still identified him. Like “Serve,” Steve’s line name, which popped up next to six girls. And “Shotgun,” Abdul’s line name, which showed only once, next to Precious Harmon.
I skipped classes and meals in the refectory for three days, asking Keisha to pick up my assignments from my professors. I walked to the vendors in the lobby, feeding change into the vending machines to buy pop, packages of chips, and peanut butter cups. I let the sugar and preservatives console me, and I avoided Abdul’s calls, until he paged me on the third day. The desk monitor who knocked on my door told me I had a visitor in the hallway. Knowing she was watching and would report back to the gossips, I gave Abdul a hug, and let him kiss me briefly on the mouth, before turning my head.