“Scooter, I’m not Methuselah. I’m four years older than you.”
“I know, but you always have to be in control. And sometimes that pisses me off.”
“So this is about you wanting to be on top in bed—”
“No, that’s not it—
“Oh, okay. You want me to give you blowjobs. Well, that’s not happening, youngblood. You can let your wife do that for you—”
“Ailey, stop! Damn! That’s not even what I’m talking about.”
He inched toward me, tugging at my hand, but I moved away. I told him I had to study, but he should feel free to watch the game. After all, he was paying my cable bill.
Three hours later, he was on the couch asleep. When I woke him and walked him to the door, he leaned in for a kiss. But when he tried to pull me to the bedroom, I pushed him away and walked to the couch. I stepped out of my sweatpants and panties and leaned over the couch with my back to him.
“Is this how you want it, Scooter? You want to be in control? Then take it.”
He didn’t leave my apartment until dawn, but I didn’t ask what he would tell Rebecca.
*
No matter how tough I’d acted with Scooter, he’d upset me. That Sunday, when Mama called, I asked her, did I seem like a bad person? Scary, even?
“I have it on good authority that everybody in the department of history says I’m hostile and possibly dangerous.”
She blew a loud raspberry. “Oh, please. That’s because you have some pride. You just don’t want to hang out with a bunch of unfriendly so-and-sos. And I bet I know which white girl started that rumor.”
“I barely say a word to Rebecca. And now I’m this female Bigger Thomas?”
“But that’s her problem, baby. You’re supposed to be lying awake nights, obsessing about her blond hair, and wondering why she’s got a Black husband and you don’t.”
“I do think about being single.”
“Child, you want to get married, ain’t no magic to it. Get you a man, a license, and go down to the courthouse. But first you got to get out the library sometimes and meet somebody, ’cause it ain’t legal to marry books.”
“You know what I mean. I’ll be thirty next year. Who’s going to want me then?”
“What are you talking about? I had you at thirty, so apparently, your daddy wanted me. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
“That’s different. Y’all were already married.”
“Baby, listen. You aren’t seeing what’s really going on. Rebecca’s scared her husband is trying to sleep with you. If he isn’t already, because I had a dream about you and that guy.”
“No, Mama! I told you we’re only friends.” I had a right to my secrets. I was grown now, or at least professing to be.
“All right, if you say so, baby. In that case, she’s just suspicious.”
“But maybe Scooter was right, Mama. I guess I could smile more.”
“You could tap-dance like Mr. Bojangles, too, but that wouldn’t make a difference. Not with those low-down white folks.”
“You just love me. You have to say that.”
“Just because I love you doesn’t mean I’m not right.”
Plural First Person
Sometimes, while Dr. Whitcomb was drilling one of my classmates, I’d look around the table. Indulge in tiny amusements, playing private games such as, what would we all have been?
With his patrician air, Boris St. John would have run his own plantation. Him with the fraternity pin stabbed through his tie. Though he was past the age of beer keg parties, on Southern Heritage Day, he joined the undergrads in dressing up in Confederate uniforms to parade around the campus main square. After that, they’d come back to their fraternity house and eat an old-style breakfast prepared by the African American cook, who’d dressed up like an enslaved person. She insisted that she was happy to do it, according to the article in the student newspaper. It was so much fun.
Harvey Dixon—how like Dixie his name was—would be a yeoman farmer, which Whitcomb had explained was basically a synonym for “white trash,” though that was a prejudiced term, like “cracker” or “nigger.” We needed to remember that.
“Our yeoman farmers, with their cherished one or two slaves apiece? We can’t say they kept the economy flourishing, but we can say they did their best. We had those good ole boys doing their part, fighting for the Lost Cause, and killing those disloyal and ungrateful runaway Negroes.”