Love and Glory

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In a classroom in the science building there were thirteen whites and three Negroes. All the whites except me wore lapel buttons that said HONKIES FOR INTEGRATION. I was for integration, but I wasn’t sure that we sixteen were going to get it done.

On the green chalkboard behind the podium at the front of the room someone had chalked a long equation, boxed it in, and written SAVE beside it. The equation was entirely mysterious to me.

A very thin Negro man came in. He was medium height with short hair and a goatee. He wore round gold-rimmed glasses, and carried a cane. He had on a black homburg, a black double-breasted suit with a faint gray pin stripe, a black shirt, and a dark gray tie. He looked down at the three Negroes sitting in the front row and murmured, “Brothers.” They murmured back. Then he leaned his cane against the podium, rested his hands against either edge of the top of the podium, and leaned over it toward us.

“My name is Willie Smith and I have been to the belly of the beast,” he said. “Before I return there, I want to tell you about it.”

He was a spellbinder. He spoke without notes for forty-five minutes of Mississippi, and the voter registration efforts there and the danger that freedom riders faced. The audience was rapt. When it was over they swirled up and to the front of the room and surrounded him. A young black man in a white coat wheeled in a table of tea and coffee and small multicolored sugar cookies, and stood silently behind the table, pouring coffee or tea as requested, and allowing people to help themselves to the cookies.

Jennifer shook Willie Smith’s hand. “You were magnificent,” she said. “Are magnificent.”

Willie said, “Thank you, thank you.”

“We are with you,” Jennifer said. “We are—” She paused for a moment, trying to express herself just right. One of the three Negroes said, “Who’s this we? You talking for all the honkies?”

I had been standing back watching Jennifer, staying out of the way. When he said that I stepped forward, between him and Jennifer. “She’s probably talking for herself,” I said. “And the people she knows. Are you talking for all the niggers?”

The room became quiet. The awful word was out. I knew they thought it was awful. But I knew that Roy Washington and I used it as commonly as swearing. It depended on how it was used. And since Roy had taught me to box I cared less than I used to about whether people liked what I said.

“You got no right to say something like that,” the Negro said.

Willie Smith was looking at me steadily.

“There’s three thousand white students in this university,” I said. “And thirteen of them showed up here. It’s dumb to call one of those thirteen a honkie.”

Jennifer put her hand on my arm. “Boonie,” she said. “He has more right to be angry than we do.”

“Not at you,” I said. “Not in front of me.”

“The gentleman’s right, brother,” Willie Smith said. “We won’t make no progress ’less we can get together.” He looked at Jennifer. “Negroes get touchy after a while, miss,” he said. “They get suspicious of white people who say we this and you that. Tends to underscore the racial split, if you see what I mean.”

Jennifer nodded. “Of course.”

“It doesn’t underscore it as much as a button that says Honkies for Integration,” I said.

Willie Smith looked straight at me and the force in his eyes behind the silly gold-rimmed glasses told me something about why he had been to Mississippi and returned. “I agree,” he said. “I see you’re not wearing one. Even though you’re here. I assume you are opposed to racism?”

“Yes,” I said.

Smith smiled. “I like that.” He put out his hand. “An honest man,” he said. We shook hands. “Ask a white man if he’s opposed to racism,” Smith said to all the audience, “and if he runs on about how much he’s opposed and how he hates it and what he’d like to do to stop it, you can be pretty sure you’ve got a man who feels guilty and probably has reason to.” He turned to me. “You don’t feel guilty, do you?”

“No.”

“Have black friends?”

“I have.”

“Some of your best friends?” Smith smiled.

“She’s my best friend,” I said.

“You ever care to come down to Mississippi and register some black voters, you’ll be damned welcome.”

“It’s a good thing to do,” I said. “But I have business here to take care of.”

Smith nodded and ate a pink cookie.

When the meeting was over I bought Jennifer a drink across the street at The Basement, a campus hangout on College Avenue.

“He was right, Boonie,” Jennifer said. “I was acting as a spokesman for my race. The classic white suburban liberal — oh-my-I-feel-bad-for-you-darkies. God.”

“You’re not responsible for your upbringing any more than the colored kid was responsible for his. You were sincere. It doesn’t matter how you put it.”

“But it does,” she said. “Language is meaning. The way you say it influences what you say. If we don’t believe that, what are we doing here?”

“Here” was actually a small dark bar with pictures of Taft athletes on the wall. But I knew she didn’t mean the bar. She meant the university. She meant the study of literature.

“Literature’s interesting,” I said. “It’s good to read, fun to talk about.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“And racism? Do you care about it?”

“I’m against it,” I said.

“But no passion?”

“I think it’s the worst thing we’ve done in this country. It’s civilization’s worst crime.”

She was smoking a Kent cigarette and drinking a small bourbon and water. I knew she wouldn’t finish it. She’d sip at it all day if necessary. She didn’t like to drink, but she loved the circumstances surrounding drink. Conversation, people, the chance to charm. Now she was interested in me. And in something more than me. Maybe in her. She was trying to talk about something she nearly never talked about. She was trying to talk about how to behave, or she might have been. It was hard to be sure with Jennifer. No one understood her as well as I did. And I didn’t understand her all the time. The velocity of her charm, the intensity of her presence made it too dense an experience.

“Is that why you went to that meeting?” she said.

“No.”

“Why’d you go then?”

“Because you were going. I enjoy being with you.”

“Why’d you come to Taft?”

“Same answer,” I said. There was normal hubbub in the bar, but around us a silence seemed to ring. Everything was slowing down the way it does in a car accident, or a fight sometimes. I was aware of my breathing and my pulse.

“Do you believe in God, Boonie?”

“No.”

“Do you believe in anything?”

“Yes.”

She let some smoke out, pushing her lower lip forward a little so that the smoke drifted up across her face before it thinned.

“What?” she said.

“The answer to that is too corny,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“I believe in you, Jennifer.”

She was silent with the smoke from her cigarette drifting in a thin swirl across her face. Her eyes were large and blue and spaced wide. “Only that?” she said.

“Only that.”

“I...”

“It’s enough,” I said.

She put her hand on top of mine. “I’ve been married eight years, Boonie.”

I nodded.

“I have a daughter,” she said. “A home, a life.”

“That what you believe in?” I said.

She was silent again, looking at the smoke. She shook her head. “I don’t think that way, Boonie. I’m very short term. I look for things to do rather than things to believe.”

“And you’re looking now?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Wife and mother’s not enough?”

“No.”