Rhythms of Grace (17 page)

A boy in the front row gave Grace a quick nod, winking in her direction.

She didn’t even blink. Instead, she motioned for me to continue and walked over to her young admirer and whispered something in his ear. His eyes went big. He sat up in his chair.

“I’m sorry, Miss Okoye. Please don’t call my mother.”

Someone laughed in the back, but when I mentioned that they could be added to the home-calling list as well, things got quiet again.

Maybe this joint-teaching thing was a good idea after all.

Next, I asked how many people were retaking the proficiency test from last year and sent out the students who weren’t.

Six students hoisted their backpacks and gave up their seats. “Passed that in middle school,” a squat girl with glasses said as she headed for the door.

“Good for you,” someone spat as the door closed behind her.

“That’s a start,” Grace said. “Cross your name off the roster as you leave and go to room two-ten.” She turned to me. “Right?”

“Right.” Somebody had been reading the manual over the holiday. Nice.

I passed out the class roster and a syllabus for the first nine weeks. “If your name is on the list, initial it, so we’ll know you’re here. If not, add yourself. Any questions?”

A girl with a nest of blue braids raised her hand. “I’ve got a question. What’s the doctor’s phone number? His dreads are ’bout to make me faint . . .”

It was my turn not to bat an eye. “Only honor students get my phone number.”

“Forget his number. I want to know about the hair,” a boy with a tall cap, worthy of a Dr. Seuss book, called out.

The hair. Always the hair. I’d joked at Ohio State that if the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, the entrance to Black America was through the kitchens—the curliest hair on the back of its neck. Dreadlocks were in again, so I always got questions. I pulled another stack of papers out of my briefcase. “How many are here because of my locks? Raise your hands.”

Eight hands crept up. I wasn’t convinced. “C’mon. We’re wasting time.”

Six more hands hovered in the air. I passed a page to each of them. “This is my hair handout. It’s all I know, which isn’t much. The tips went blond on their own.” I stared at Grace.

“Yeah, right.” The cat in the hat sounded quite disappointed.

“Try lemon juice. And mark through your name on the way out,” Grace said in a velvety voice that made the boy smile.

It made me smile too. With the aisles clear now, we settled into our first beats together as teachers, speaking with eyes and hands, making the students laugh and often laughing ourselves. As the bell rang, ending our first ninety-minute block, I felt something in my gut that I hadn’t felt in a while . . . the ache for a woman.

This woman.

22

Zeely

Jeremiah looked bad. I hated to think it, wouldn’t dare say it, but it was true. I straightened my first-day-of-school suit and looked down at my new, freshly done nails. He was off his game as much as I was on mine.

He towered over me as he whispered good morning. His breath smelled like hot garbage and scrambled eggs, and his clothes looked like they’d been balled up in a pillowcase and run over by a car. The edge on his haircut was overgrown and the bags under his eyes looked big enough to swim in. It was all I could do not to climb a chair and tuck in the tag poking up from the neck of his shirt. I didn’t want to embarrass him, not like he was embarrassing me. And yet, he didn’t look concerned at all.

Men have the luxury of letting themselves go, of knowing that someone will always want them. Need them. Women are expected to look like airbrushed movie stars, all while giving birth and cooking dinner. Oh, and while working too, because if you’re a black woman, looking good isn’t enough. You need sixteen degrees, a house, and your own church, school, or other charitable organization. And that was just to get a date.

Jeremiah distributed math pre-tests as though he was dressed in a tuxedo. As he passed me, he gave me his superstar smile, the one that I’d once taken for something more than a good camera angle. Besides his faith, that smile was the only thing about Jeremiah that remained from the man I remembered. In fact, his walk with Christ seemed to have grown where his hygiene diminished. We had talks about God now that we never could have touched back then. Still, if I had a choice, I would have preferred his former appearance with his newfound spirituality.

The thing was, I didn’t have a choice. Not anymore. We’d all made our choices. Now we had to live with them. Though Jeremiah was stingy with the details, his marriage to Carmel had chewed him up and spit out the remains. He looked like I’d felt that night when I saw them together the first time.

Only it wasn’t their first time that night.

It was mine.

A boy in the front row raised his hand. “Big Dog? You got a calculator?”

My head jerked toward him, a disheveled pixie stick with matted icicles of hair pointing in every direction. The nerve of these kids. “That’s Mr. Terrigan to you.”

My partner smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. His touchdown code from college. The other girls always wondered how I knew to start the right cheer.

Except for Carmel. She was always right with me.

Right with him.

The memory ran down my back like ice water, forcing me straight up. Erect.

Jeremiah stood over the boy, smiling at me and then at him. “I have a calculator, son, but today I want to see what your mind— your calculator—can do. Technology is a tool, but you have to dig by hand first, you know what I’m saying?” He curved over the desk like a life-sized question mark.

The boy shrugged and wrote his name on the paper. A few seconds later, he walked to my desk and turned it in. Blank.

Now in my chair, I crossed my legs at the ankles, resting one snakeskin pump behind the other. Wrinkled or not, Jeremiah could still take down anybody with his charms. I had the wounds to prove it.

23

Jerry

Just watching Zeely made me hungry. Hungry for God. Hungry for the youth I tossed away, the promise I gave up to satisfy my lust. Just looking at Zeely, picture perfect in that orange sherbet suit, made me want to break and run. I wouldn’t though.

The last time I’d followed my impulses with regard to her—the pounding desire to do something, anything, to be free—I’d run into a brick wall with big hips and brown eyes. A wall that I’d never been able to climb over, not even after I’d been thrown down from its heights. My wife.

Now I was back, wounded and weary, trying to figure out how this all started in the first place. These kids wanted things easy. A calculator. Open-book tests. Life wasn’t like that. The things that seemed easy were so much harder than they appeared. Things like the way Zeely looked at me when I’d come to work this morning, the question in her eyes:
What happened to you?
It stung, like an openhanded slap.

What was worse was the question that she never spoke, never even expressed with her eyes:
I waited . . . for this?
Everyone in town had the same question on their faces when I gave them change at 7-Eleven or nodded off in church.

“Isn’t that the Terrigan boy? The big one who used to sing in the choir? I thought he played football somewhere. I saw him on TV once, long time ago . . .”

Zeely had waited for me and I’d betrayed her in every way. Even worse, I’d come back in worse shape than I’d left, broke and broken with nothing to offer her. I’d spent all of myself, leveraged my soul, and still I was in the red. There was only one thing I’d kept. Something ticking in the safe-deposit box at Winter’s Bank like a time bomb. The one secret I’d kept from my wife, the one vow I’d made to my mother.

This is for Zeely Ann and no one else. No one else.

Mama had left no room for failure, no space for the devil to get a foothold and climb into my life. And yet, I’d failed her anyway. All I had left now was a sparkling reminder of all the promises I’d broken. It wasn’t much, but I still had that. I still had something.

Throughout the day and all the days that would come after, I moved through the class with a plastered smile, trying to pretend that I was leaking through my worn-out shoes. Every now and then though, a kid like Sean McKnight would come in and catch my pass, blazing through problems like a terror on his way to the end zone. Every now and then, I’d get the look of approval, acceptance from Zeely, a sharp nod worthy of pom-poms. In those moments, I’d throw back my shoulders: shoulders that had carried Zeely after a victory; shoulders that had hovered over Carmel after a loss.

Zeely had kept her promises to God and he’d kept her, held her up for all this time. After all the pain I’d caused her, she was still here.

Still whole.

Still offended when someone addressed me by one of my many nicknames: Big Dog, Omega, OJ. She’d hated them all.
Don’t answer
to just anything
, she’d always told me.
Next thing you know you’ll
be taking anything. Doing anything.
She’d been so adamant about it that I sometimes thought she was talking to herself too. She wasn’t though. Didn’t need to. The only label anyone had ever given Zeely that she didn’t choose was her mother’s.

And mine.

Mrs. Zeely Ann Terr-i-gan.

My little sisters used to sing it to tease me. I’d hated it then. I mourned it now. My hand eased across the chalkboard, scribbling down the order of operations:

“Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication and Division from left to right, Addition and Subtraction from left to right . . .”

The words kept coming, my hand kept writing. My mind stood still, stuck on the way Zeely’s spine had snapped straight when I’d given her a thumbs-up this morning. The last time I’d seen her stiffen like that was in a run-down church in Xenia decked out with Christmas lights in June.

My wedding.

24

Grace

Daddy won’t say it, but he knows. I hear Mom crying
behind the door, but she’s not talking to me at all. God
talks to me, though. I just don’t tell anyone.

Diana Dixon

It was too late to bury it, too late to run. Each entry in my old notebook brought me closer to the girl waiting quietly, patiently for me to reclaim her. The girl that had cost me so much already. Every day at Imani, I saw other girls like me; girls with secrets.

And then of course there was Brian. There was no point calling him Doctor anything now. Just as it had been so long ago when I danced and he drummed, we flew together in the classroom too, finishing each other’s sentences, quoting each other’s favorite poems. It was too late to be afraid of him, so I was starting to be annoyed instead. The few talks we’d had about religion let me know where he stood.

Off limits.

The Bible said God didn’t tempt anybody, but if this wasn’t a temptation, it must have been a trial. Each morning I marked off another school day on my calendar. The last day of school would be my last day in Testimony. That much, I knew for sure.

In the meantime, there was our class.

Brian came early most days now, wrote down a word on the board for the class to contemplate quietly while I took roll. The proficiency track divided its time evenly between our class and Zeely’s, with the electives required for graduation filling in the rest of their days. Today’s word made me wish I’d taken my prayer walk this morning. He was planning to go deep. As if to dispel my doubts, he walked back to the board and underlined the word:

Griot.

“Anybody know what that means?”

“A storyteller.” The boy who answered had started out in the back of the class, but moved a little closer to the front every day, usually on my end of the row.

Brian gave him an approving smile. “Right. In West African culture, where most African-Americans originate from, the
gree-oh
, not
gree-ot
, was the storyteller of the village.” He tapped the board. “Each time we meet, I will choose a griot to recount the previous class material. You can present it any way you choose—rap, poetry, story, whatever. All I require is an effort and the correct information. And brevity of course. If you don’t know what that means, check your vocabulary list.”

Two girls continued recounting a fight they’d seen the day before after school as though Brian wasn’t even speaking. Before I could correct them, he gave them a sideways glance.

“The assignment will be a tall order for some of you, especially when you won’t stop talking long enough to hear it.”

“How many points for the griot thing?” Jodi, a stern brunette who took furious and copious notes every time Brian spoke, held her pen ready to take down his answer.

Brian smiled. “The griot
thing
is one test grade. So make it good. Review your syllabus when you get home. It’s all in there. You don’t have to write this down.”

Everyone else dropped their pencils. Jodi eyed Brian suspiciously and scribbled on. It was my turn to smile then. The girl had her challenges—her past academic record and a two-month-old baby among them—but she’d go far. I did wonder what, if anything, had happened to keep her from trusting anyone’s words. I didn’t want to think the worst, but one thing my life had taught me was to listen and watch. My hunches often proved true.