Five days a week, Keisha, Roz, and I rose in the dark morning. One of us would heat water for tea on our forbidden hot plate. Then we’d throw on robes and go downstairs to the dorm lobby, where there would be other young women studying as well. Two hours of that, then breakfast in the refectory, where I drank several cups of cola before going to classes. At noon, I downed a caffeine pill with lunch.
Throughout the day, I’d silently repeat the facts of the body, but I was less interested in cells, systems, and connective tissues, and more in the backstories, as when my elderly anatomy professor entertained his students with tangents. A retired physician from Alabama, Dr. Turner told us about the Tuskegee experiment of the 1920s and ’30s, when the government refused to cure a group of Black men with syphilis, just to watch the disease’s horrible progression. Another tangent was about Dr. Turner’s white professor in medical school. He had reminded his students that it was a well-known, scientific fact that the colored race didn’t have the same filial affections as other races. They didn’t feel physical pain much, either, the white professor had said. You could cut into their flesh with a scalpel and they wouldn’t even flinch.
“Can you believe the nerve of that white man?” Dr. Turner asked. “Making up science like that?”
After classes were over, I ate dinner with my roommates and walked to the library alone—Keisha didn’t believe in late hours. I’d stay at the library until it closed at ten, then walk to my dorm and sit in the lobby with earphones on and study some more. On good nights, I climbed into bed around midnight and woke at five.
When my eyes popped open in the dark morning, I’d lie there as self-pity slithered through me. I had no passion for science, no care for the body’s gory pathways. I didn’t want to be a healer, but I thought about my parents and what they had gone through. My childhood hadn’t been perfect, but they’d done the best they could. I was sacrificing for them now, as they had sacrificed for me. I’d roll from bed and turn on the hot plate. I’d tell myself, yes, I was tired. And yes, I hated science, but at least I finally had girlfriends who weren’t my blood relatives. And true friends were important at Routledge, because the scrutiny of female students was ruthless.
Sisters had to be cautious with their reputations; each spring the guys released the annual “Dirty Thirty” list, which named the most sexually active sisters at Routledge. We had to be careful about what we did, what we said, when we checked into the dorm during the weekdays, and how many guys we’d been seen with during the academic year. Even if nothing sexual took place with any men, some young women would violate the sister code and turn on others: spreading gossip was the best way to knock out four or five females from that female-to-male ten-to-one ratio.
Keisha didn’t worry about gossip. Her reputation was sterling: she turned down frequent male invitations to the Rib Shack, explaining without any embarrassment that she was saving her virginity until marriage, as was required by her Christian faith. “Jesus is my husband,” she’d tell the guys who asked her out. She couldn’t date because the Devil never slept. Especially, he suffered from insomnia on Saturday nights, the hours before God’s faithful servants would convene.
Roz was bossy, but she turned out to be useful. She schooled me on the dating scene at our college, one of the topics Dean Walters hadn’t mentioned in Freshman Orientation. Not only was there one male to every ten females, that one dude might be country and ’bama, if he was a local. Unofficially, Georgia was number four in the ’bama category; the states of Mississippi, Alabama, and the entire city of Cleveland, Ohio, were numbers one, two, and three, respectively. And since the pickings for non-’bama mates were slim, female romantic anxiety ruled our campus. A few weeks into first semester, Dean Walters sentenced two young women to behavioral probation. They’d fought over the same homely guy who’d sported a jagged S-curl. Even if the fights weren’t physical, frequently, matters degraded into public shouting matches, which didn’t make sense to Roz. There was no need to fight.
“Because niggers ain’t shit. And white boys ain’t no better. You can’t trust a man.”
Roz didn’t tell anybody information about her vagina, but one might imagine it was made of platinum as much as brothers had begun to pursue her. On Sundays, brothers kept sitting on our pew during mandatory chapel service. They stopped by our table in the refectory, placing large candy bars on the table. They asked her to the movies in Milledgeville and left urgent pink message slips for her at the dorm reception desk. Curt Waymon, the president of Gamma Beta Gamma, was particularly insistent, marking his territory with daily takeout from the Rib Shack. When that didn’t help him get next to her, he gave her his fraternity pin. Sometimes she let Curt take her to the movies, though she only let him kiss her with tongue and touch her boobs.