“I think you’re high, and you don’t need to shout.” For the past half hour, she’d retained a bored expression as Steve whispered close to her ear, holding a hand to his chest as if defending himself.
“Are you sure boom means a crash, Pat?” I asked. “Are you absolutely sure?”
He put his hand on my arm, squeezing briefly. “Yes, baby. Can you lower your voice a little? If you’re afraid I won’t hear you, lean close all you want, ’cause you smell very good.”
I spoke in an exaggerated whisper: “I’m sorry. But wouldn’t boom sound like rumble, instead? I’m trying to get my onomatopoeia right.”
“This jawn pulling out the big vocabulary words and shit,” Abdul said. Of the three males in the room, he was the most handsome. He was dark brown and growing in an eighteen-year-old goatee. There was a crowding to his top front teeth, but the dimples made up for the imperfection. The muscles didn’t hurt, either, but his being a complete asshole ruined the aesthetics.
He snapped his fingers.
“Ay, ay, Steve! This jawn right here says the word ‘boom’ is an example of onomatopoeia. Can you tell me what that word means?”
“Can’t you see I’m busy over here?” Steve inclined his head toward Roz, widening his eyes. A lock of my roommate’s long hair was stuck to his face.
“Answer the question, Steve.”
“I don’t know, Abdul. And you better stop tripping.”
“Naw, that’s you, son. You know that’s Curt Waymon’s jawn you talking to.”
My roommate said she didn’t belong to anybody, but her would-be suitor announced he had a test the next day. Yeah. A test. So okay, bye. He slammed the door in his haste to leave.
Pat returned his hand to my arm.
“The people won’t put up with Bush’s shit much longer. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, goddamnit.”
“So you’re talking about the French Revolution,” I said.
Abdul clapped. “Oh! This jawn really thinks she’s smart, don’t she?”
“I am smart. And why do you keep referring to me in the third person when I’m sitting right here? And what in the West Hell is a jawn?”
“It’s a person, place, or thing.”
“Abdul, that word is not in the dictionary.”
“It don’t have to be, Ailey. That’s what you call vernacular.”
“Well, I never heard of it.”
“You need to get out more.”
Pat interrupted our bickering. He put out a hand and nodded in an exaggerated fashion. Let’s have peace. Let’s make love and not war. “And be more polite to this beautiful young lady. Don’t scare her away. Because I want her to come back.”
“See, that’s your problem,” Abdul said. “You can’t be nice to these females. You gotta let them know who’s in charge.”
“Agree to disagree on that, my brother.” When Pat pulled another joint from the front pocket of his shirt, Roz told me I could smoke my weed five more minutes, and then we had to get back to our dorm. She wasn’t missing curfew.
In This Spot
In Dr. Belinda Olufunke Oludara’s classroom, a cone of incense burned on the desk. Her head was completely wrapped in blue-and-red printed cloth. She wore a dark-blue shift that skimmed over her very wide hips; underneath the shift, matching pants. Around her neck, several strings of chunky amber. There were gold earrings that hung nearly to her shoulders, matching the gold bracelets on her wrists. She sat down on the edge of the desk and waved her hands. Her cadence was dramatic, as if she were putting on a one-woman stage show. The bracelets clanged as she moved.
“Welcome, my brilliant scholars! I do have a doctorate, and you should respect that, as any Black woman who made it through seven years at Harvard has earned her propers. To paraphrase the great poet Sterling A. Brown, ‘More Negroes have been ruined by Harvard than by bad gin.’ Only he didn’t say ‘Negroes,’ if you catch my drift.”
The class tittered.
When I’d signed up for my spring classes, Uncle Root had advised me to save room in my schedule for treats. I didn’t want to burn out in my first year of college. I needed a respite from premed classes, but when I’d handed him the college catalog, he’d put it aside.
“You need to take a class with Belinda. She’ll definitely clear your sinuses.”
Dr. Oludara had been the old man’s prize student in history. She’d graduated from Routledge in 1972, gone on to Harvard for her master’s and doctorate, traveled to Nigeria on a fellowship, and come back to the states with her African husband. Then, to the old man’s complete shock, Dr. Oludara had returned south, bought a home an hour outside of Atlanta, and applied for a teaching job at Routledge.