And Do Remember Me (18 page)

“Yes.”

“I read about it in the
Herald-Tribune
in Heathrow Airport,” he told her, wondering how she felt talking about Raj, thinking about him, feeling his own pulse quicken, his own skin grow warm at the memory of Raj’s face when he hit him, the bruised, battered feeling that had invaded his fist. He had changed and saved nothing that day.

“I know something happened between you two, Pearl,” he began, unable to look at her as he said this. “I’ve always known. I never knew exactly what happened. I only knew it was terrible for you.”

“Lincoln, please let’s talk about something else. Anything else.” Pearl nervously looked at the other tables, wondering if the other patrons could hear what they were saying, if they could see the shame that had branded her instantly, the moment Lincoln said his name. If she could have disappeared without moving, run, without leaving her seat, she would have been gone. This wasn’t the script she had rehearsed, imagined, conjured in her head the past week. These weren’t the words she had daydreamed they would exchange. She could still hear Lincoln, going on, despite her plea for him to stop.

“And I never told you, but I should have, how sorry I am for letting you down. I feel responsible in some way. I didn’t listen to you. And I should have. But it hurt me so much, when you didn’t tell me. After that, Pearl, I felt like there was nothing for me to do but leave.”

“I couldn’t tell you then, Lincoln, and I can’t tell you now. Anyway, that’s the past, it’s over,” she said, her voice rising, arching, straining for a confidence she would have to marshal to, carry her through the rest of the evening. Taking a deep
breath, she said, “I read about your marriage. Congratulations. Are you happy?

“I am,” he lied. “Are you?”

“Yes,” she lied, too.

T
HEY GOSSIPED
about actors and directors they knew. Lincoln told her anecdotes about the Hollywood stars he had met and worked with. They reminisced. In the end, it was this trivial, nonthreatening talk about others that salvaged the evening. When they finished dessert Pearl told Lincoln, “I’ve come up in the world, I want you to see my new place.”

“Sure, where is it?”

“West End Avenue.”

“That’s a long way from Harlem, baby,” Lincoln grinned.

“Not so far,” she said, returning his smile.

Pearl now lived in a modern twenty-story apartment building. On the way up to the fifteenth floor, she and Lincoln stood in a corner of the elevator with their arms wrapped around each other. In her apartment, Lincoln admired the sleek modern furniture, the framed prints on the wall and the huge art books on the coffee table. An hour later, they had finished cups of coffee and lay in each other’s arms on the sofa, when Pearl suddenly remembered, “And I’ve got this great view, I want you to see it.”

But before she could move from the sofa, he pulled her back toward him, saying, “You’re the only view I want to see tonight.”

It was as though they had just kissed yesterday. “I never forgot you. I never did,” Lincoln said. “Do you know how many
times I wanted to come back, to start all over again?” He was unbuttoning the back of her dress and Pearl was helping him out of his jacket. “But I was afraid you’d tell me to go away. You were always pushing me away, Pearl. But in my whole life, I’ve never found anyone like you.” Pearl reached across to turn off the lamp. In the dark, Lincoln pushed down her pantyhose and opened her bra, burying his face in her soft breasts. As she threw his shirt across the room and reached down to expertly remove his underpants, she said, “I’m sorry, Lincoln, I’m just so sorry.”

They took one another on the carpeted floor in the living room and against the wall beside the startling view that she had wanted him to see. They slept and then found themselves in Pearl’s bed where she recited passages from the plays Lincoln had written for her. Lincoln promised that when he next got the chance to direct he would insist that she be cast in a lead role. They made love and promises into the morning, and woke next to each other as unsure of their relationship as they had been when the previous evening started. Lincoln slipped out of bed and took refuge in the bathroom where he showered and dressed. He opened the bathroom door to find Pearl propped up against the pillows staring straight at him. Lincoln stood in the bathroom door and saw Jessie Foster’s eyes and Pearl Moon’s trembling, expectant smile. She had survived. Without him. Lincoln sat on the edge of the bed beside Pearl. He held her in his arms. When he started to speak, she placed her fingers on his lips. “Let’s just improvise from now on,” she said. “There aren’t any more roles to play.”

Lincoln kissed her and said, “I’ve got to go.”

W
HEN MACON ENTERED
the Black Student Union’s tiny office, she was too startled to move. She stood reading the word Nigger over and over, its red spray-painted letters, furious and immense, leaping out at her from every wall. She felt sick. But before sickness could overwhelm her, anger staked its claim. Books whose spines had been broken, whose pages had been torn out, lay in a messy pile beside an overturned desk. The posters of Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Sojourner Truth lay shredded at her feet, knife cuts scarring each dark face. In the hall behind her, Macon’s students stirred, moved once again by the sight of what they had discovered earlier in the day. Finally she walked across the littered floor, retrieving a book from the pile as she sank slowly into a swivel chair.

Stunned, the students huddled outside the entrance to the office, or stood inside the room a few feet away from the walls where the epithet was scrawled. Fisk Randolph, a junior, righted the desk and perched on a corner, nervously kicking his leg. These students, Macon knew, had probably never witnessed anything as heartbreaking as this. Standing before her
were the fresh-faced children of the black middle class. Many of them had attended elementary and high school with whites, had dated white girls or boys. When they took her class on the history of the civil rights movement they told Macon that no one had told them the things they were learning. They had been prepared for everything they were meant to encounter in life but this.

“You aren’t going to let them get away with this, are you?” Macon asked, scanning the group before her.

“Hell, no,” Fisk said eagerly, kicking the edge of the desk. “Ever since I came in this morning and found this, I’ve been trying to map out a strategic response.” Fisk was an honor roll student, majoring in political science, and a star on the basketball team. “I called the student paper, and the president’s office.”

“I’ll call the
Washington Post,”
Macon said. “I’ve got friends there who might be able to cover this. And I’ll arrange a meeting with the president.”

“I think we need to have a rally,” Fisk said, now clearly enthused about the possibilities the incident suggested.

“That’s a good idea,” Macon said. “It’s very important that you go on the offensive, fight back.”

“Will you speak at the rally?” Fisk asked.

“Of course. And I’ll work on a statement that the rest of the black faculty and staff can sign.”

“How will we get this off the walls?” Fisk asked, looking around the room, despair momentarily shadowing his resolve.

“That’s the problem of Buildings and Grounds. For right now the Black Student Union needs a new office. And you need one immediately. Tell the president that.”

Macon sat with the students for nearly an hour and discussed the strategy for the protest and then one by one they drifted out. The last student to leave was Marva Dunbar, a freshman. While the others were talking, she had busied herself
with retrieving the books and papers from the floor, trying to make order out of the chaos of the office. When she and Macon were finally alone she asked, “Why, Professor Fields, why?” She stood before Macon, vainly trying to repair a hardback edition of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography that had been torn in half. The young girl’s hands simply would not give up as they pieced and gathered the pages into the broken binding. “I have a white roommate, what do I say to her after this?”

“I don’t know why, Marva,” Macon confessed. “Marva, I really don’t. All the books I’ve read, the books I’ve written, the political work I’ve done, and I still don’t know why. But I can tell you this; you say what you feel to your roommate, let her know that what happened in this room hurts you and that it should hurt her too.”

The girl smiled weakly at these words, which had satisfied Macon even less than they had assured Marva.

“Thanks, Professor,” she said, “I’ll do that.” She picked up her knapsack, slung it over her shoulder and left, still holding the damaged book.

Macon had planned to stay in the office a while longer, to simply sit at the desk, as an act of defiance. But when Marva left the room she stood and gathered her briefcase and books, so chilled was she by the atmosphere in the room. Then her eyes moved to the room’s only window. It was cloudy and overcast outside, the weather as brooding and intemperate as she now felt. A vigorous gust of wind swirled the piles of late November leaves in the main yard of the campus.

Incidents like this had occurred at campuses all over the country, at isolated obscure schools and at institutions as prestigious as Amherst and Brown. In response administrators held conferences, conducted surveys and studies, but still nobody could answer satisfactorily the question Marva had asked.

It had been a rough semester. One of Macon’s students, a senior, had been killed in the parking lot of a local nightclub, another had attempted suicide. Macon’s hand moved instinctively, as it now sometimes did, to the place where her left breast used to be and gently rubbed the spongelike prosthesis beneath her sweater. This reflexive, unconscious action, she had concluded, was the sign of her grieving. Her hand comforted and still wondered why.

M
ACON TAUGHT
sociology at Jefferson College in Fairfax, Virginia, where her students were mostly young and white, produced by worlds so economically and racially homogeneous that, for some, she bordered on the exotic. In each class she required an autobiographical essay and in these papers she found evidence of the tensions riveting these students’ worlds.

In her course the Sociology of the Afro-American, the brutal yet unsuspected prejudice, learned at home, mastered at the dinner table, found expression. Her students often incorporated the dangerous, muddled clichés of political candidates into their essays on current events. In the women’s sociology course, Macon received accounts of casual, accepted physical and psychological abuse of mothers and daughters; the burdensome, required search for beauty; the still strong hold of romantic love as a censor of impulses that might separate women from their traditional legacy.

Yet each semester there were a handful of students whose intelligence was wedded to a sparkling diligence, whose questions turned Macon’s notions and theories inside out, students who turned her, in the face of their questions, into a student.

The few blacks in her classes huddled together like refugees;
a solid united front gathering confidence from one another. They were unknown quantities to their white peers, unexamined and unimagined. In the face of this startling yet mundane indifference they sought solace from each other. They attended a school that had special scholarships for nonwhite students, and various academic support systems in place to ensure their success, yet, it was also a school that, in the last year, had become home to a student white supremacist organization that Macon was certain had ransacked the BSU office.

Macon had found no cloistered, ivory towers at any of the schools where she had taught. Reality was what stared back at her from the eyes of her students, what she found in the politics of various departments.

Despite this, she taught for the same reason she had worked in the movement—to influence the shaping of the world, to thrust her vision and commentary into its flow. Friends had died in the movement, and she taught to honor them.

Macon was a tenured, senior faculty member, the author of two respected books, yet, as she left the BSU office and walked across the campus, she felt vulnerable and unsure. Her presence, legitimacy and place in the academy seemed to be always open to question. She felt she had to earn the respect of her colleagues over and over every year. Raising her collar against a sudden brisk wind, Macon realized that she knew the answer to Marva’s question, but she had simply lacked the courage to reveal it.

A
S SHE NEARED
her car in the parking lot, Macon bumped into Hilton Butler, the energetic head of the Sociology Department.

“Macon, how are you?” he asked.

“Fine, fine,” she said, trying to disguise the way she really felt.

“How are you really?” he asked, placing a large hand on her shoulder. “I’ve heard more convincing lies from my six-year-old.”

Tall, bearded, with wavy, wiry blond hair, Hilton possessed the robustness and spirit of a mountain man. Macon had told Hilton about the cancer when she discovered it, swearing him to secrecy, fearing the pity of her colleagues as much as the disease. As far as she knew, he had not violated her confidence.

Macon told Hilton about the ransacking of the BSU office and he asked if there was anything he could do. She suggested a faculty meeting to discuss the incident and to plan ways to discuss it in classes. Hilton agreed.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he complained.

“I’ve been around, but my classes have been at the same time as faculty meetings.”

“Are you still in remission,” he asked gently.

“Still.”

“Good, I’m rooting for you.… Did you get the memo about the dinner at Cassie’s house for the candidate from Penn State?”

“I got it.”

“Will you be there?”

“Honestly, Hilton, I’ll try.”

“You can’t do more than that. Go home and get some rest.”

T
HE DRIVE FROM
Fairfax to Washington where she lived was about forty-five minutes and driving along Route 495 Macon
thought of the changes that had occurred in the state of Virginia. She had grown up in Richmond, once the capital of the Confederacy, a city steeped in a stubborn nostalgia for the antebellum world, and crowded with statues and monuments to fallen rebel commanders. Listening to a John Coltrane tape on her car stereo, Macon wondered how well Jefferson Davis and James Madison slept in their graves now that a black man called the governor’s mansion home.