My mouth trembled as he swooped his arms around, comparing Jacobs’s situation to “Who Stole the Soul?” from Fear of a Black Planet.
At lunchtime, my roommates and I sat in the refectory on the room’s margins. The table in the center was reserved for members of Beta Alpha Beta Sorority. Even Roz, a direct descendant of a founding Beta Lily, didn’t dare trespass.
Abdul placed his tray on our table, and Pat and Steve followed suit. It was an unseasonably warm January evening, but the Three Amigos still wore their long-sleeved shirts and khakis. Abdul’s chewing stick had disappeared. The gossips believed they were “Rocks,” pledging Gamma Beta Gamma fraternity underground, which was rumored to be a months-long process.
“Who said you could sit here?” Roz asked.
“We always sit with y’all,” Abdul said.
“I know, but you can’t do that anymore.”
“Girl, stop acting cute.”
“I don’t have to act. I am cute.”
“Move your shit, Miss Siddity.”
Roz looked around as if searching for someone. When she scraped back her chair and stood to go, Keisha shot me a pained look. As a social work major, she tried to get along with everyone. It was a professional requirement, and back in our room, she told our roommate her behavior hadn’t been very nice. The Three Amigos were our friends. Even Abdul, with his rude self.
“Yeah, Roz,” I said. “Why’d you leave?”
“Y’all know Abdul and Tiffany are kicking it.”
“How you know?”
“Because I do.”
“But who cares?”
“I care. I’m trying to pledge Beta in the fall.” Roz began her tired harangue, that Beta Alpha Beta was a family legacy. As a fourth-generation legacy of the sorority, she couldn’t be turned down for membership unless her grades tanked. Or if she had morality issues, which might come up if somebody on campus tried to start a rumor about her sleeping around. She had to be extra careful. She planned to be a lawyer and live in Atlanta, so she needed Beta membership, because there wasn’t an African American city official in that town with any clout who didn’t have Greek letters—
“Okay, already,” I said. “But you know they won’t turn you down.”
“Maybe, but they can beat me when I get on line. They can beat you, too, if you apply. And if you don’t leave Abdul alone, Tiffany’s coming for you.”
“Don’t nobody in this room want to fuck that guy.”
Keisha cleared her throat and I quickly apologized for using foul language.
“Watch,” Roz said. “As soon as them two go public, every other sister gone want him. That’s the way that goes.”
But in the days that followed I refused to leave the table whenever our friends sat down, though Roz continually warned I might ruin my chances for Beta, or, at best, acquire a reputation as a gold digger. Pat’s departed grandfather had donated that million dollars to build the male honors dorm. He drove his grandfather’s old Mercedes, too.
None of our roommate’s concerns swayed either Keisha or me. We kept sitting with the Three Amigos in the refectory. I still tutored Pat in math in the library carrels, and he still flirted endlessly.
Feminism, Womanism, or Whatever
“Abdul, you must not have read the essay,” I said. “When W. E. B. Du Bois writes, ‘The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,’ he incudes women implicitly. It’s a rhetorical shortcut.”
“No, it’s not. He means it’s the role of men to lead. Men, not women. You the one can’t read.”
Pat touched Abdul’s shoulder. “What about the Negro women’s club movements? What about those sisters who helped found the NAACP? That’s leadership.”
“No, that’s support,” Abdul said, as Steve made assenting noises.
“But what about Jessie Fauset helping Du Bois with The Crisis?” I asked. “The Brownies Book was her idea. And she published all those writers during the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. That wasn’t Du Bois’s work. He just took credit for it.”
“But then Fauset wanted to run things,” Abdul said. “Instead of her standing behind a brother where she was meant to be. And that’s the problem, sisters wanting to be in front. Like I said, feminism is for white women.”
“Are you kidding me? What about the handout on womanism and feminism Dr. Oludara gave us? And that essay on intersectionality?”