The day Dean Walters led us on the tour of Freedom Library, Abdul committed a horrible faux pas: he stepped on Judith Hutchinson’s lapis lazuli heart. We had started our tour in the basement, where there were twenty new computers that had been donated by an alumnus. We stood and admired the screens, and then we filed up the back steps into the dark and frightening stacks, where the books were kept, and where there were study carrels. Dean Walters told us there were three levels of books in the stacks, and more in the reading rooms. When we came out on the first floor, Abdul was at the end of the line, with my roommates and me. He deliberately walked into the middle of the lobby floor and stepped on the heart. Then he smiled.
Mrs. Marie Giles-Lipscomb walked from behind the counter and began yelling. “What are you doing? Get off the heart! This is a sacred symbol! You might as well be stomping Jesus on the cross!” She gestured at the floor with both hands, but Abdul deliberately lifted a foot and put it right back on the heart.
Our professor turned, saw the scene, and started yelling, too. Abdul stepped back several paces from the heart, but Dean Walters quickly followed, making sure that he stepped around the heart on his path. He stood very close to Abdul. Though he perched on his toes, he was too short to get into the younger man’s face. But his menacing words carried.
“Boy, I see you smirking,” Dean Walters said. “But let me tell you, this is not a joke. That’s the last time you step on the heart. Do you hear me? You put any part of your body on that heart and I will expel you by the end of that day. I don’t care if you have a stroke near that heart, pass out, and accidentally fall on top of it. I will expel you. Now, you walk back over there to our librarian and you apologize for your ungentlemanly, rude behavior.”
Abdul hurried over to Mrs. Giles-Lipscomb, who folded her arms at his approach. Whatever he said, he whispered it, because I couldn’t hear him. The librarian’s frown only softened by a few degrees, and as he kept whispering apologies, she gave a short nod. She turned and walked behind the counter. Abdul walked back to our class group.
We continued on our tour, walking into the main reading room, where a velvet cord blocked off a large, framed sepia-toned photograph of Mrs. Routledge and Miss Hutchinson, our two founders. Though the women were sisters and dressed identically in long, dark dresses with full skirts, they looked nothing alike. One woman was very fair, the other very dark, but both women looked grim, as if somebody had told them something that ruined their day, moments before the picture was taken.
As we filed from the reading room back through the lobby of the library, the librarian gave Abdul a nasty look. On the mezzanine, there was an exhibit of graduation class portraits. The class photos didn’t begin until the 1920s, Dean Walters explained. That was when Violet Routledge De Saussure, the founders’ daughter and niece, came up with the idea to document the college’s legacy. In the earliest pictures, most of the faculty, administrators, and students were so pale, they were racially indeterminate, though I thought I recognized a very young, cocky-looking Uncle Root in the class of 1926.
Keisha tugged on my shirt hem and leaned close. “These supposed to be Black people?”
“I think so.”
“They sure don’t look it.”
Roz walked behind us, whispering, be quiet and look at the pictures. She could trace her Routledge legacy back four generations through her mother; one of the racially indeterminate students in the class pictures was her ancestor, though the bloodline had thickened through the generations. Roz was my mother’s chocolate color, with a heart-shaped face, thick-lashed eyes, and full lips with a small mole at the right corner. She wore her relaxed hair in a braided bun that other students whispered was a cheap wig. Yet besides Keisha and me, no one seemed to notice her beauty. The guys on campus chased after the palest women, the lighter the better.
But then came the Friday afternoon when the air conditioner in the chapel stopped working. It was one of those early September southern days. The temperature had risen to a freakish place in the nineties, and everyone in the chapel was sweating. Dean Walters went to find maintenance, warning us, do not leave. He would be checking roll when he returned.
Beside me, Roz fanned herself, sighing; she was about to pass out. She reached to her neck and pulled out her bobby pins. Her braid fell to her waist.
“Ooh, girl.” Keisha unraveled Roz’s braid, and whispers began in the chapel. Wait, that wasn’t a wig, after all? That was her real hair?
The next morning, when our roommate pinned up her braid, Keisha walked behind and yanked out the bobby pins.