We left after the last of the speeches, carefully closing the door so it wouldn’t slam behind us. Outside, it had settled into full darkness, and Scooter insisted on walking me to the car. He held on to the door handle and talked in a concise baritone, while I sat with my keys in the ignition.
His family hadn’t forgiven him for eloping after college graduation, during his internship. Two years later, he’d turned down Wharton for business school at North Carolina Regents University, because his wife wanted a change of scenery. His family was sending him a generous monthly stipend, and he hoped they would come around to the marriage, because Rebecca’s family wasn’t going to accept him. Her parents hadn’t cared where she attended graduate school, or whether she eloped, but they were absolutely pissed she’d married a Black guy. Scooter’s family wasn’t too happy, either. His father had tried to roll with things, but his mother had held out hope that he’d marry a sister, even though his other girlfriends had been white, too.
“What did Mom expect?” Scooter asked. “She sent me to Phillips Academy and Brown. There weren’t that many Black girls to date. And now what? Am I supposed to divorce Rebecca?”
“I get it, brother,” I said. “You don’t have to convince me. I’m good.”
We laughed, and I told him that after I turned down medical school, I’d needed a job, so I took one as a research assistant for one of my college professors, and I caught the historian’s bug. My mother had wanted me to reapply to medical school, but my father wouldn’t have minded. That is, if he hadn’t died.
Scooter placed his hand on the edge of the car door. He told me he was sorry about my father. His face was open, so full of emotion, like Denzel Washington’s in the whipping scene in Glory, when that single tear had traveled down his cheek. It was the drop of water that had soaked every pair of Black woman’s panties in the United States of America. I raised a hand to put over Scooter’s, but let it fall away: I had to defuse this situation, before it went too far.
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Shoot.”
“Youngblood, did your mama really name you after a motorized toy? I’ve heard some strange handles before, but yours has to be the absolute worst.”
Take that, you beautiful, married bastard.
He only laughed, opening his mouth wide enough for me to see the pink of his throat.
“No, woman. My mother did not name me Scooter. My name is Quincy. I am not a junior and I am not a third.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out a card, and wrote his phone number on the back and gave it to me. On the front, there was only his name: Quincy X. Park.
I asked, did the X stand for Malcolm?
He told me it most certainly did not.
*
No one had suggested graduate school to me—not the old man, and not my mother. I’d come to the decision of grad school on my own, after nineteen months of working for Dr. Oludara. I’d been so reluctant to reach into the bookshelves lining the walls of her second office. To explore the articles in the banker’s boxes I’d stacked in the office’s closet, but when I’d begun to dive into the materials, the stories of the people had spoken to me.
No matter how dry the prose of the books and articles, I could see the people in my imagination. Their old-fashioned clothes of heavy wool, and boots that buttoned up. I poured voices into their mouths and rounded the words that might emerge. But they weren’t characters. They were real people. I couldn’t turn away from them. I didn’t even try, and frequently, Dr. Oludara told me I’d caught something she hadn’t seen in her reading. She’d stop by before it was time for me to leave for the day, sit down, and we would talk about her project. Many times, the building would empty, and it would be dark when I pulled up to Uncle Root’s house. He didn’t complain, though. He’d tell me he already had made himself a sandwich.
It had been an early September day when I knocked on the door of Dr. Oludara’s main office, asking, did she have a second?
“Ailey, I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to make this grant deadline. “
“Oh, okay. I didn’t mean to bother you.”
She looked up from the computer screen. “Can you give me a couple hours? Hold that thought, all right? Don’t forget.”
It took until the end of the day, because I had to drive to Milledgeville and mail off her fellowship application. I was afraid that she’d be gone by the time I returned, but she was still there. She had a while, she said, because she was not about to drive back to Atlanta into that afternoon traffic. I fidgeted, and she told me, don’t be afraid to speak my mind.