When Tiffany arrived with Darlene, they sat on the opposite side of the gym. Both were shooting me narrow looks, and it gave me a perverse charge. I’d upset the Sherbet Queens.
“Ailey, you want to take a walk to my dorm?” Abdul asked. “My roommate’s gone to Atlanta for the weekend.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
When we crossed the yard, Tiffany shouted his name; she’d followed us. Even after what she’d done, I was embarrassed for her as she ran toward us. When she grabbed his sleeve, I turned my head and looked at the blackberry bushes instead. They were bare this late in the season, but I couldn’t stand to see Tiffany’s face.
“Come on, Abdul, let’s go back to the gym,” she pleaded. “Come on, let’s get some nachos. My treat.”
“Thanks, baby, but I’m not hungry. I’ll call you tonight.” He snapped his fingers. “No, wait. I got a test. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after. We’ll see.”
When he and I walked away, she lost her renowned composure, the reasoning behind the line name she’d been given while pledging Beta: “Portrait of a Lady.”
“That fucking hoe better not write Beta in the fall! You hear me! That hoe better not come near any of my sorors, either!”
Not since Antoinette Jones had I been called out of my name, and I touched my head, remembering my bald trauma. When Abdul put an arm around me, Tiffany began screaming epithets about my crackhead sister.
In his room, I reached into my purse and pulled out a condom. I handed it to him, took off my clothes and underwear, and lay down on his bed. As he moved inside me, I began to cry. He asked, what was wrong? Nothing, I told him. Keep going.
V
The North, therefore . . . has much more than an academic interest in the Southern negro problem. Unless the race conflict there is so adjusted as to leave the negroes a contented, industrious people, they are going to migrate here and there. And into the large cities will pour in increasing numbers the competent and the incompetent, the industrious and the lazy, the law abiding and the criminal. . . . The crucial question, then, is: What does the black immigrant find to do?
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Black North: A Social Study”
This Bitter Earth
When Maybelle Lee Driskell began first grade, there was only one school for Negroes, the one at Red Mound Church. On Sunday, this was where she and her family worshipped, but from Monday through Friday fifty-nine Negro children sat in the two rooms of the church. The first room was in the church sanctuary, where the children sat in the pews and balanced their books on their laps. The other room was the fellowship hall, which had three picnic tables. That was the room for the middle and high school students, a group that thinned as the children of sharecroppers dropped out to join their families in working the land.
In 1954, when Maybelle Lee was eleven years old and told everybody she knew to call her “Belle” now, the principal of Red Mound Church School had walked into the second room of the church—the middle and high school room—and announced the Supreme Court verdict in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. Miss Rosalie McLendon was wreathed in triumph. She was a plump, brown-skinned spinster with short, neatly pressed hair. During the days of the week and on Sunday, her flesh was stuffed into an unforgiving girdle underneath the fashionable dresses a Negro seamstress in Macon made for her.
That day, Miss McLendon’s second in command, Mr. Lonny Maxwell, stood beside her. His future ruin as an alcoholic was years away. That afternoon, Mr. Maxwell continuously nodded, while Miss McLendon explained what the Brown case meant: school segregation was over now, and Negro children could sit alongside white children in the same schools. No longer would the white children spit out of their bus windows at Negro children who had to walk through the countryside to school. And no cast-off textbooks with torn or missing covers and pages, either. One day, there would even be Negroes who taught white children—everything was going to change!
As W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied, though, everything did not change in the aftermath of the Brown case. The Chicasetta School Board allotted money for one bus to take the Negro children in town out to Red Mound, but the schools in Chicasetta would remain segregated. The textbooks were still cast-off and filled with racist abuse, and it was beyond comprehension that Negro teachers would ever instruct white children.
Six years later, the newspapers would report about Ruby Bridges, the little girl who was the first Negro child to integrate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana. One would think that a six-year-old in pigtails wouldn’t be so frightening to a bunch of adults; after all, what could she do, a child only recently liberated from infancy? Would she throw up or pee on somebody? Stick her tongue out and let it dance? Yet the segregationists in New Orleans acted as if Ruby was a dangerous animal. They gathered their defenses to resist her. Until they became used to seeing Ruby’s small body encased in her fancy church dresses, Monday through Friday, climbing those endless-to-a-six-year-old steps, the whites in New Orleans who didn’t want their children sitting next to a Negro girl broke fool in front of that learning place. Taunting Ruby. Threatening to charge through the phalanx of U.S. Marshals who surrounded her. One white woman promised to poison Ruby, and so Ruby’s food always had to be carried from home, packed in a brown paper bag by her mother. Another white woman put a chocolate-colored baby doll into a coffin and shook it as the little girl walked along.