Fire Shut Up in My Bones (26 page)

I didn’t know whether to puff up with pride or collapse in tears.

I had done the one thing that I wanted most to do since the day that I ran across the basketball court and she laid into me: I had removed that fright from her eyes and silenced the worry in her rebuke. I had pushed down that part of me that so offended folks. My mother could now breathe freely, even if it meant that I was left gasping for air.

In the fall, I returned to school thinking that I could acclimate to my new perch as a Brother. I moved off campus again, renting an apartment with a Brother who had just transferred to Grambling from another school. At our first chapter meeting, we held elections. Instead of starting with the lower offices, we started with the most important—president. I sat on the floor in a corner as two other Brothers were nominated, trying to decide which would get my vote. I settled on the guy everyone called Cake, a round-faced boy who walked knock-kneed, like it was intentional and cool. He was older and respected among the Brothers, and he was Chopper’s roommate.

Then something happened I hadn’t foreseen: Kaboom nominated me. I was flattered but taken aback. What did I know about the workings of the fraternity? I wasn’t only a new member, I was also the youngest member. Besides, I had been reelected class president while I was on line, a sympathy vote no doubt, and that would keep me plenty busy.

We nominees had to step out of the room for the discussion and vote. Cake was so sure he was going to win that he told me and the other nominee that he definitely wanted us to work with him to move the bond forward. I was sure he was going to win too, so I nodded my agreement. Soon the door opened and the Brothers waved us back in.

Someone said, “Congratulations, Bro. Blow, our neophyte president.”

What? Surely there was some mistake. But there was no mistake. I had won, mostly on the strength of my line brothers’ votes. Kaboom had often told us when we were on line that, because there were seventeen of us, if we voted as a block we could have our way, and that is exactly what happened.

The tradition was that the exiting president would visit the entering one, turn over all fraternity business, and give advice. So the exiting president, a tall, hulky boy with small wire-rimmed glasses called Big Hoss, who was from a small town just north of Gibsland and always called me homeboy, visited me the next week at my apartment.

When we were pledges, the Brothers had stressed to us that “the bond is a business,” so I expected the chapter’s records to be in order. But they weren’t. For instance, Big Hoss couldn’t tell how much money we’d raised the year before or how it had been spent.

I decided that if the ideal was for the bond to be run like a business, I would run it at peak efficiency. I got the back statements from the bank and audited the chapter’s finances. I realized that we made most of our money from paid parties after football games—as much at $3,000 a party—but that there was no consistency as to which games would be followed by a party. I decided they all should be—no need to leave money on the table.

At the parties, I worked the door to ensure that our dress code, “dress to impress,” was enforced—no jeans, no sneakers. To make sure no trouble erupted, we hired off-duty police officers, and we never served alcohol. Our logic was that girls wanted a safe place to go where they could dress up and dance with equally well-dressed guys without fear or fights. The strategy worked. Our parties were always packed with pretty girls, so much so that they often complained that there weren’t enough boys to dance with. That was one of the perks of being one of the Pretty Boys, another reason to endure the beatings: the never-ending stream of girls, mostly those enamored of the idea of us.

The girls and their attention caught me off guard.

My nights were rarely lonely, my bed rarely empty. I was being chosen, constantly. There were so many I could hardly keep track. Only a few stood out: the ones I truly fell for and the quirky ones. There was the half-white daughter of the Chicago militant who smiled like the Cheshire cat. The ex–ballet dancer with the quick-to-bleed toes. The Compton-born foster child. The girl with the pacemaker. The bookish girl with the glasses who showed up on my doorstep wearing a trench coat and nothing else. The half-Asian girl on a mission to “sow her wild oats” before marriage who kept a list of prospective conquests, a list I was on.

All the girls and the strong friendships I developed with my fraternity brothers overtook the male apparitions. The relief of that absence, and the sheer volume of girls, allowed me for the first time to discern what I truly liked in a lover: lightness. Lightness of body and lightness of spirit, girls who played with a gossamer-fine femininity, twirling it around the ends of their fingers like a cloud of cotton candy, the kind that melted with the touch of a tongue. I had been around heavy women all my life—all weight and worry and anger—women who warned of pistols in purses, girls who boasted of being quick to “cut a fool” and “snatch a bitch.” I craved the opposite.

There was one girl who stood out above all others. Her name was Greta. We met during my listless summer, when I was recuperating from pledging. Chopper, another of our fraternity brothers, and I had gone to a nightclub in Shreveport. Once inside, Chopper and the other boy quickly found girls and headed to the dance floor. I stood around the edges; nightclubs made me ill at ease.

I wasn’t a conventionally handsome boy like most of the other Brothers. Puberty had pulled and stretched me since the Ringgold pageant judges crowned me the black Little Master. I was tall and wiry. My nose was long and spread wide at the nostrils. My head was large and my face gaunt, like President Lincoln’s profile on a penny. The attributes I was most confident about—smarts, resourcefulness, resilience, proper etiquette—didn’t register in a noisy nightclub.

That night I asked a few girls if they wanted to dance, and each demurred in that way that said, “Yes, but not with you.” I didn’t know how to speak in the dulcet tones that wound-up men speak to holdout women, so I stood watching everyone else dance, until I spotted one of the most striking girls I had ever seen.

She was part Creole, the color of champagne, with light brown eyes that sparkled even in the darkness. But for some reason my eyes set on her hair. It was stiffer than that of other girls who looked like her. It was the kind of hair that works against a brush, the kind that stubbornly holds a shape when it’s ironed, the kind that could only grow a hand’s length before it broke off, no matter how much care you took.

She was dancing alone and smiling—a broad smile, showing too much of the gums. I built up my courage, approached her, and asked her to dance. “Yes,” she said, to my surprise. She was from Shreveport, just graduated from high school, and had sneaked into the club with her older sister to celebrate. I told her where I was from and why I was there, whatever I could get out between the dances and over the music. She seemed as taken with me as I was with her, which I found hard to believe. Soon her sister came for her, but the girl didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay with me. With me! But the sister insisted, so the girl wrote her name and telephone number on a napkin and headed toward the door, disappearing into the crowd the way a special marble blends into a bag of many. I looked down at the paper: “Greta,” along with seven digits scrawled in careless block lettering—the sloppy kind of writing that would get your knuckles rapped in grade school.

In the weeks that followed, I called a few times and tried to arrange a date, but she always seemed to be busy. I assumed that the heat from that night had cooled, that what I had felt from her was a random flirtation, not actual interest.

But that September I saw Greta again. She was a Grambling freshman and was at one of the back-to-school block parties, hanging with a group of other pretty girls. One of them was a high-strung, preternatural beauty named Erica Wright, whom the world would soon come to know as the singer Erykah Badu, “the queen of neo-soul.” I found out that Greta was running for Miss Freshman, and, having run for a freshman office myself, I figured I had a great way to strike up a conversation and jog her memory about our night in the club.

I approached, said “Hi,” and asked if she remembered me. Greta giggled and said “No,” though I was sure she did, only I was even less impressive in the sobriety of sunlight. Before I could gather myself, she disappeared. I was hurt and angry and vowed to myself that I would never allow her to forget the snub.

She won the election and became part of Miss Grambling’s court, which meant that we’d spend a lot of time traveling together that year. But I did my best to pretend I was unimpressed by her, and uninterested. No one knows how to hold a grudge like a proper Southerner. She began to make advances, but I assumed she was only making fun of my contrived antipathy. Besides, she already had a boyfriend. But as the year wore on, her overtures became more urgent, until finally it occurred to me that she was sincere.

Soon our clandestine meetings began. I had fallen in love with her the night I met her, even if I had tried to forget it and deny it. That night she had come into me like a cloud of milk first introduced to coffee—stirring beneath the surface of me, bringing lightness and taking away the bitterness. The idea that she might love me back was almost overwhelming. After the trials of pledging, I had come to believe that the toughest part of me was the best part of me, the way folks say sugarcane is sweetest at the joint, but Greta seemed to value something I thought I had left back in Gibsland.

I remember the first time we kissed, not because there were many sparks, but because there were few. Greta moved my spirit more than my flesh, the opposite of what some of the other girls had done. I loved Greta in a different way, a deeper way, the way bodies come together more for completion than passion. There was something searching and tender in the way I touched her, the way you touch a body to be sure you are awake and not dreaming. I was at home when I was with her. My spirit loved this girl in a way that it had never loved another. It was a deep-in-the-bones love, the kind where you ache when you are apart. With her I relaxed, exhaled, forgot myself, and became myself. We laughed all the time, at everything and nothing, a giddy, punch-drunk response to the realization that we had found another who could truly see us, know us, read us.

We let down our guard and lay naked and vulnerable in each other’s arms—as naked and vulnerable as I could allow at that phase of my life. The more we talked, the more I understood that her wounds were as deep as mine, only different, which drew me to her even more—me marveling at our matching scars. As with most girls who chose me, she saw in me an echo of her father—smart and distant—a boy tasked with renewing her faith in men. We were both searching for redemption and validation, aiming higher than our station, pretending to be more refined than our families and histories supported. In fact, I lost sight of where I ended and she began, the way you can lose the line where clear skies meet calm seas.

We spoon-fed each other’s narcissism, fanned the flames of each other’s ambition, counseled each other on problems, shielded each other’s weaknesses, held each other’s secrets—many of them, though not all.

She was not willing to be mine, not completely. She overtly held a bit of herself back, as I secretly did the same. She was somebody else’s girlfriend and always would be during the years that we crept around in the shadows, through the late-night pickups and predawn drop-offs. I pretended that was the way I wanted it, because that was the way she insisted it be. But that, for me, was a lie. I wanted her more than she wanted me, and that fact increasingly injured my pride.

The time that she gave to me, she stole from him. I often wondered what she whispered in his ear after spending the night in my bed. It was hard for me to reconcile, that she loved me enough to risk her relationship with him, but not enough to forswear it. This kept up until one day she came to my apartment to tell me that she had made up her mind to be faithful to the boy who believed she loved only him. I pretended that I agreed, and that it was all for the best, but when she left, my heart broke.

I became convinced that love would be unattainable for a boy like me, that it would pass me over in this life, and that I needed to make my peace with that.

Soon, the weight of being the fraternity’s president—the thing I believed had taken me as far away from the boy I had been as it was possible for me to be—became more of a burden than a badge. During my two years in the post we had two ugly brawls with other Grambling fraternities. The first brawl, which landed our chapter on probation, started at a party another fraternity—the nerdy boys—was having. There was some confusion at the door about whether one of my fraternity brothers had paid his admission. It ended horribly in the parking lot, with the police indiscriminately spraying Mace and with several combatants suffering injuries so serious they had to be taken to the hospital. The second brawl, which earned us a suspension, started with a flagrant foul during an intramural basketball game. The other fraternity—the country boys—was playing rough, taunting us “pretty boys.” By the last foul we had had enough. The benches cleared and the fighting spilled out into the street, with people threatening to pull guns.

At the same time, a sophomore from the Bronx with a congenital heart defect died at Morehouse College in Atlanta during an “underground” hazing session. A few months later, the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the governing body of all historically black Greek-letter organizations, met and decided to ban pledging altogether. There would now be a two-week “membership intake process” instead.

Young Brothers were furious. They saw the elders who made the decision as hypocrites and apostates—virtually all of them had been hazed and had been hazers themselves when they were younger. And young Brothers saw the decision as a desperate business move by those who feared—rightly—that hazing lawsuits posed an existential monetary threat to the organization. There was nothing young Brothers despised more than the idea that the fraternity was choosing corporate interests over cultural ones.