“And let go of that hurt, that degradation of the past. That’s what Mrs. Routledge told her students. Don’t hold on to that madness. And then one of her students found the spot. The place where the blood of slaves had soaked into the ground. It was darker than the rest, even though this land is a red dirt place. After all those years that bloody spot was there. That was a horrible moment, and after Mrs. Routledge cleared this area, she decided, it was full of too much pain. Her schoolhouse needed to be someplace else on this piece of land. She left this spot alone, so it could heal. And that’s why there are no campus buildings here.”
Dr. Oludara stopped clapping. She released a large sigh.
“We have so much work to do, my young scholars! There is a reason for your presence, right here, right now. I am so happy to be your guide this semester, and I ask you, do not forget the blessing of this place. Don’t you ever forget.”
She was quiet for the next few minutes, as we students gathered our shoes. We laughed off our emotion, the embarrassment of the moment, until Dr. Oludara told us, let’s head on over to the Rib Shack. It would be her treat for all of us! Communing with the ancestors was hungry work.
*
“Goddamn!” Abdul ejected. “You telling me Harriet Jacobs couldn’t find no eligible brothers to get with?”
Dr. Oludara raised her finger in protest. “Brother Wilson, not cool at all. Apologize.”
The antebellum review took place in the second week of Dr. Oludara’s class, and Abdul fidgeted in his chair while she explained that, initially, scholars had thought a woman named Linda Brent had written Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, but in the late 1980s, somebody discovered the author’s real name was Harriet Jacobs.
“My bad, Doc,” he said. “I mean, I’m sorry.”
“All right. I will forgive you.”
“But Doc, look. If that jawn was in danger, how’d she find time to make not one but two half-white babies?”
“That’s so foul,” I said. “My cousins are mixed.”
Abdul raised his hands, palms forward. “I didn’t say a thing about your family. I’m talking about Harriet Jacobs. Did her children not have a white daddy? Thus, they were half-white.”
He looked at Steve, who nodded vigorously. Behind them, Pat leaned back in his chair, but the annoyed look on his face told the real story: his friends were getting on his nerves.
“Are you saying we’re supposed to feel sorry for this woman?” Tiffany Cruikshank asked. “Because I don’t. Jacobs willingly had sex with a white man. Being raped by Mr. Flint would’ve been better than what she did.”
“Wow, that’s super harsh,” I said. “How is rape possibly better?”
“Getting down on purpose with a slave master makes her a tramp, which is how white men viewed Black women anyway.”
“That’s, like, seriously old-fashioned.”
“Yes, Ailey, and I’m proud to be that way. You went to some private school with white folks, right? Is that why you think like a whore? Or are you one already?”
I caught my breath. “Oh my God, did you just say that to me—”
Our professor called for order and for kindness. “Sister Cruikshank, you owe Sister Garfield an abject apology! Your insult of her is rude, cruel, and completely uncalled-for. In other words, it’s not ‘the jam.’ Isn’t that what you kids say nowadays?”
There was laughter at her attempt to be cool, and then Tiffany gave me a gruff apology, looking at the space over my head.
When I spoke again, my voice shook. “I’m as Black as anybody else at this school, and I’m not anybody’s whore, either. I can’t help that my parents sent me to a private school. Whatever to that. I was just saying I think Miss Jacobs might have loved that white man she had those babies with. And maybe he loved her back. Maybe he thought she was a lady.”
Abdul and Steve erupted into outraged groans and then assaulted the air with their Public Enemy hand gestures. By 1992, PE had rendered Black male rage, with its attendant body language, fashionable again. Northern brothers on campus regularly quoted long passages from the group’s lyrics. Even back in high school, Chris had urged me to listen to their albums, praising Chuck D’s philosophical brilliance—even if his sudden Black identity hadn’t kept him from attending Princeton instead of Routledge.
“How’s a white man ever going to respect a Black woman?” Abdul asked. “Girl, where are you from?”