Delicious Foods (6 page)

What else you got to say, Mr. Big Stuff?

He had bitten his tongue.

Darlene leapt down the stairs and bent over Nat’s injured ankle just before Hazel triumphantly clomped down the steps in her heels—roach-stompers, everybody called them—her breasts swinging defiantly under a loose blouse.

Cocking her head, she finally addressed Darlene. And
you,
you ain’t nearly got a
inkling
of what’s coming on you. You hear?

Hazel reached into her pocket. She squatted over Nat and, as he rose up to his knees, brought a cupped hand to her lips and forcefully blew some kind of acrid dust into each of their faces, enough of it that they had to close their eyes against the stinging grit. Hazel stood up and shouted a French phrase that Darlene did not understand, then raised her hands, flicked them at Nat, and brushed them free of dust above Nat and Darlene. The substance turned out to be a puzzlingly dirty, possibly volcanic soot that stuck to their cheeks and lips; Darlene thought in horror that it might be somebody’s cremated corpse. In another moment, Hazel clunked across the main road and disappeared, leaving them to clean up and regain their wits.

Ridiculous gris-gris, Nat grumbled to Darlene, though he couldn’t see how gory he looked—a squiggle of red liquid at the corner of his mouth, and his teeth soaked with blood from where he had bitten his tongue. It doesn’t work. She carries it with her all the time. You’ve never seen it? Stupid.

Yet when they returned to school, it did seem as if some bizarre spell had taken effect. Not on the two of them, but on everybody they knew. News of the scandal had spread rapidly, no doubt hastily pollinated by Hazel’s own sharp tongue. By the end of the weekend an unspoken banishment had begun. Suddenly their identities were hollowed out; they were nobodies. Even Nat’s status had fallen somewhat, if not as far as Darlene’s. As she clacked across the dorm lobby, lugging her suitcase, people who used to smile, even the ones who didn’t know her, studied the floor as she passed. None of them offered help as she bumped up the stairs. When Darlene got to her room and pulled back her bedclothes she found a dissected frog in the center of the mattress, bleeding formaldehyde.

One of Nat’s roommates, a man whose girlfriend spent a lot of time with Hazel, jumped him, knocking the wind out of him. Three weeks later, a different guy Nat didn’t know asked him for directions to the student union, slugged him in the stomach, and ran. The guy hadn’t seemed like a Grambling student—Nat and Darlene wondered if Hazel had relatives or dangerous connections outside the university and had started calling in favors. Their paranoia soon reached a high pitch when Darlene became the victim of many ugly pranks.

In the next month and a half, the majority of Darlene’s notebooks got stolen or destroyed. As she turned the pages of her textbooks during classes she found the words
WHORE,
SLUT,
and
CUNT
scrawled across them in red Magic Marker. The faces of her family in photos she’d left on her dresser grew mustaches and beards. Their eyes were blacked out and crude drawings of genitals sprang from the children’s heads and mouths. Her sorority sisters, including her roommate, Kenyatta, denied responsibility for the vandalism. Darlene received phone calls from strangers at very early hours, the weirdest at three a.m. on a Wednesday, a computer voice that sounded like a children’s toy threatening to cut her throat.

Someone put sports cream in her bra, and the burning came on during an econ exam, numbing and searing her chest until she gasped and nearly passed out, even after carefully twisting free of the straps without removing her shirt and hiding the icy-hot garment between her legs. She flunked the test. Nobody admitted doing any of it, and she had too many suspects to point at anyone in particular. It staggered Darlene to discover how terribly people, even so-called sisters, could treat you as soon as they had an excuse. Hazel hadn’t needed any powder. It turned out black magic didn’t work because of spells or potions but because of the fear of persecution and conspiracy that roiled under people’s lives like contaminated groundwater.

Darlene struggled against the abuse, thinking it would eventually subside, but it didn’t. The authorities, meanwhile, saw the pranks as isolated incidents, not a system of torture, and didn’t offer Darlene help. Her sisters hid behind their reputation. Sigma Tau Tau girls volunteered at soup kitchens, as the school’s administrators frequently reminded her, they led can drives and supported upward mobility in the black community with their bake sales. They performed, in their trademark periwinkle and tangerine, at senior citizens’ centers. They organized step shows and church bazaars and raised funds for people with cerebral palsy. Nobody believed that they had ganged up on Darlene, and finally she felt she had no choice but to leave Grambling.

Nat had grown extremely protective of Darlene, and as the attacks against her continued, their social world shrank and their bond intensified. He claimed responsibility for everything that happened to her and insisted on leaving school along with her. Darlene and Nat arranged with their professors to complete as many finals and papers as they could while missing a few classes and took steps to transfer to Centenary, in Shreveport, explaining as little to their families as possible, evading any questions about their relationship. Nat’s excitement grew at the thought of transferring when he found out that Centenary had a basketball team with great potential—the Gentlemen, a name that made Darlene laugh. The NCAA was punishing the Gents, he said, by failing to report their statistics; Nat had met a Centenary player named Robert Parish, a center, who had one of the best records in college ball, but nobody knew. To Darlene it sounded like Nat had more disappointment and injustice in store, but she donated an empty smile to his efforts anyway.

Even before the semester ended, they fled to Shreveport, living together not because other young unmarried couples had begun to make it fashionable, but because they had nobody else to rely on. Darlene’s sister, Bethella, was the only other family member who had gone to college before her, and she’d run off to Houston and never turned back. Darlene felt she couldn’t return to her family’s country ways after taking on all her college-girl habits and aspirations. The last time she’d gone home, her older brother, himself a high-school dropout, had pushed her psychology textbook off the table while she was studying and later, at the same dining-room table, told everybody how proud he was of her. Still, she had never gotten the highest grades, and her banishment dampened her mood and lowered her academic standing. It could’ve been worse; Nat’s adoptive father, Puma, a religious and shrewd man, figured out the whole story, and what he called Nat’s profligacy, mendacity, and premarital fornication disgusted him so thoroughly that he wouldn’t allow his son back home.

Afraid of campus housing at Centenary, after a few months, they found a small house with a wide yard on Joe Louis Boulevard. While talking to a new neighbor, they heard that Holiday in Dixie would begin that night. It was a lackluster, month-late shadow of Mardi Gras; that event truly happened only in New Orleans, but this second-rate party welcomed them in a way that Grambling never would again. Even the lukewarm gumbo bought from a truck stand filled their heads with the memory of hotter spice and juicier andouille, and though the salmon in their beggar’s pouches was all gray flesh and skin, the oily phyllo still flaked properly against their teeth, and that provided just enough comfort. They felt they had made the right choice.

Despite the loss and shame of leaving Grambling, Darlene felt she had won whenever she glanced at Nat. He’d agreed to go with her when he could have stayed and forsaken her along with the rest. He’d settled for a less impressive basketball scholarship. Words can’t prove true love, she would think, only the list of sacrifices you make to keep it alive. Nat had demonstrated his love through his honor.

Nat didn’t know much about his real parents, only his mother’s first name. The agency might have known more, but they refused to release any information to him. His foster parents had adopted him at thirteen, after the system had pinballed him through unstable East Texas homes where supposed brothers stole his baseball cards, mothers beat his shins with pool cues, and sisters tied him to chairs as a playtime activity. Only his growth spurt put an end to the abuse. Out of the six homes he passed through, he’d wanted to stay in only two of them, the first belonging to an affectionate divorcée with apple-shaped hips, the second to the family who ultimately adopted him, the Hardisons: his foster mother LaVerne, a tubby young woman with freckles and keloids scattered on her skin; his adoptive father, Patrick, nicknamed Puma, a sturdy throne of a man the color and complexion of a walnut, a tense and authoritarian ex-Marine whose tough love contained very little of the latter ingredient. From Puma, Nat absorbed a fervent admiration for the military and respect for authority, as well as the desire to emulate the straight-backed heroes of Iwo Jima and Korea.

Their few new friends at Centenary did not know that Nat and Darlene’s intense and somewhat paranoid bond had arisen from their persecution at Grambling. On a double date, a couple they knew from the Black Students’ Union stared when they shared from one plate and when Nat rose to let Darlene out of the booth to go to the bathroom and then followed her to the door. They joked uncomfortably when the two returned, but Nat couldn’t see what they found so unusual. Darlene mentioned shyly that they had registered for most classes together too.

We’re both majoring in econ, she said, and we help each other through all the madness. I make flash cards for us. It’s fun. We’re practically the same person now.

Their supper companions smiled and changed the subject, and they often had standing plans when Darlene contacted them in the future.

Almost concurrently with their banishment from Grambling, a deputy in Pensacola had shot a black man dead at point-blank range with a .357 Magnum. A little later, someone strangled a material witness who’d said that she had a relationship with the deputy and had seen the murder. By the end of January, the grand jury had acquitted the deputy. Hundreds of people took to the streets in Pensacola, but seventy policemen beat them with clubs. Nat followed all of this and became outraged; he showed as much anger over these events as he had about what had happened to Darlene, and she wondered if he was letting Pensacola stand in for the earlier, more personal injustice. Now he insisted that they had to work for equality, even on a small scale. Then Darlene realized that she was pregnant, the child probably conceived a week or so after they’d decided to transfer from Grambling.

Now Nat felt inspired to move to a smaller town, like the one near Lafayette where Darlene had grown up. The pregnancy seemed to make his wishes inevitable, even necessary. Somewhat randomly, Nat chose Ovis, Louisiana, a village on the shores of the Mississippi, half submerged under the poverty line, in part for its odd name. The name sounded humble to him, like the sort of place where he could organize and mobilize small-town black folks. He’d also gotten inspired by Tom Bradley’s and Maynard Jackson’s political careers; it seemed a portal had opened for black mayors to get common people to recognize that safety and power came with the right to vote and that involvement in politics could raise their standard of living and prevent injustices like the one in Pensacola. The nation would soon turn two hundred years old—it was about time.

The fetus, however, as if to scorch the edges of their idealism, did not come to term. Nat and Darlene kept the door to the second bedroom of their new home closed for the greater part of the next year as they regained the strength to want a child again.

The following September, Eddie was born—prematurely, and the difficulty of caring for him added to the upheaval in his parents’ lives. With so little money, they ended up waiting to get married until Eddie was about six months old. They had no doubts about their relationship, but the official fussiness and expense of a wedding, added to the obligation to mobilize their families, had always seemed trivial and irritating compared to their monumental romance, their social dreams.

Though Nat, through his family, had known the stubbornness of rural folks firsthand as a child in East Texas, he still maintained a dreamy faith about the potential they represented. He had, after all, made something of himself, and he knew others could also. Occasionally he’d speak immodestly of himself as a Moses-like figure leading his people through the desert, but in truth, he faced a maddening grind convincing people to register to vote when they still felt that they might be harmed for attempting to better their lives. Nevertheless, Nat and Darlene opened a general store called the Mount Hope Grocery on the town’s tiny main street, and lonely, destitute men and women gathered in its back room to drink in the peace and companionship of similarly hopeless people. For the most part they admired Nat’s determination to mobilize the community, his fund-raising, his voter-registration drives, but they did not expect rapid change.

Sparkplug McKeon, however, a shiny-faced man whose compact body had taken on the shape of the three-legged, threadbare living-room chair that was his favorite in the dusty yard out back, would shake his head diagonally every time Nat launched a new initiative. Won’t none of this come to no good, he growled. I seened it too many a time.

He told three tales of recent, nearby woe to illustrate his point. The first involved a Northern activist, a black girl of seventeen who had been abducted, raped, and gutted with a fish knife in Acadia Parish, probably by the Ku Klux Klan.

Cold case, Sparkplug said, raising an eyebrow, and we all know what that mean.

The second had to do with a Jew who was shot in the face outside Baton Rouge because of a rumor that he’d been having an affair with a white woman prominent in the community. Sparkplug told this one to prove that the hatred ran deeper than just prejudice against Negroes.

Catholics too, he said. Ain’t nobody different had no chance in this damn state, he asserted, shaking his head.