Grace (12 page)

He knew her story before he married her. He had read her poems. He wanted to know if his rival still owned her. They blinded him. The passion in them was searing. Bordering on insanity, he would think later. And she would lose control of her mind when her beloved died. She fell into a depression, she said, from which she was saved by graffiti on a wall that gave her the strength to resist that downward plunge her mother had taken after her father died.

After Hunter College High School, she went to Spelman, on scholarship. She did not want to be a minority again, she said. Hunter had been more than enough for her. Which was probably why she was attracted to Jack Benson. He had no time for white people, he said. He did not care what they thought or what they said. He wore black, his favorite color. The color that contained all colors, he said. The richest of colors. He let
his hair grow long, in thick dreadlocks that reached down to his waist. But the clothes, the hair, were superficial symbols. Money was Jack Benson’s god, greed the ideology that spurred him on.

For five years she and Jack lived happily together, she spending her days in midtown at the publishing company where she worked, he uptown repairing used cars for sale in his friend’s auto body shop. So she thought, for she did not know of his underground life, or that he had supplied her brother with his deadly heroin habit. She did not know it until he was shot, inexplicably, in front of her, outside a café in Lower Manhattan, in the ABC village, while they were drinking wine and talking of love.

They shot him gangster style, from their car, with deadly accuracy. She said the only thought that flashed through her mind when he fell across her lap was that the same thing had happened to Jacqueline Kennedy. For her life with Jack Benson had seemed to her a Camelot too.

But Jack Benson was no knight, as neither was Kennedy. The police came the next day and gave her his aliases. Jack the Ripper on the streets of Bed-Stuy, Jack the Enforcer in Harlem. When she righted herself, she put away the poems that had made Jack love her. She moved to Brooklyn. She would teach primary colors to primary school children. She would write no more.

Justin would meet her not long afterward, on that miraculous Wednesday afternoon in Fort Greene Park. By chance he
had looked up and was stunned to see the most beautiful woman in the world pass him by. He thought, when she consented to go out with him, that his life could get no better.

He found the poems at the bottom of her drawer. He had asked for a photograph of her brother.

“In the second drawer,” she said. “In the bureau in my bedroom.”

The poems were wrapped in tissue that had yellowed. He pulled out four.

He could not believe she could have enough love left for him.

“It’s gone. Vanished,” she said. “He means nothing to me but a dead hoodlum.” But she asked him for the poems and burned them all when he left.

If she had been a true poet, Justin had said, she would write no matter what. But the truth was, and he knew it, he was glad she had burned the poems. He wanted a normal wife, a wife who loved children, a wife who loved the domesticity of marriage, the security it provided. He did not want a return of his childhood: his mother sleeping in her employer’s house, his father in the arms of his lover, their son cared for by a lonely aunt.

She said yes, that was what she wanted, so he married her. He loved her. He tried to forget that once, before him, she had been a poet.

Giselle comes to their bedroom early in the morning. Her jeyes are puffy. She is clutching her doll. She wants her Mommy. Sally picks her up and puts her on the bed near to her, in the crack next to Justin. In seconds she falls asleep.

“I think she should stay in bed all day,” says Justin. Sally agrees.

He notices that Sally, too, looks ill. “I’ll take care of both of you today,” he says. Sally leans across Giselle and kisses him.

They sleep past noon. When they wake up, he makes the same breakfast for them that his mother made for him— pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon.

“You should both stay home tomorrow,” he says. He promises to call the principals at their schools.

JUSTIN DOES NOT get their cold. The next day he goes to the college. He sees Mark Sandler in the parking lot, speaking to
Lloyd Banks. Lloyd Banks is a colleague. He teaches in the Africana Studies department. He is a stocky man with bushy graying eyebrows and a heavy mustache. Every day he wears a dashiki to work, on cold days over a brown or black turtleneck sweater. He cuts a formidable figure, the ideological pedagogue who will not be toyed with. Until very recently, Lloyd Banks has had little to say to Justin.

“Professor,” Mark Sandler calls out to him, “I was telling Professor Banks what we discussed.”

Lloyd Banks smiles. “How’s the family, Justin?” The mustache lifts.

“Under the weather right now. Both Sally and Giselle have colds.”

“It’s this infernal snow. My children are sick, too.”

Lloyd Banks has seven, with two wives. At least that is what he calls them. One is a marriage recognized by American law, the other was officiated by a Yoruba priest. Justin does not dare ask which of his children are ill, or if all of them are. He will not go into that hornet’s nest. Lloyd is a self-proclaimed Afro-centrist. He believes that the point of reference for all studies must be Africa. He calls Justin a Eurocentrist. Lately he says it with affection, teasingly.

They came close to blows more than once in the core curriculum committee. Banks was arguing that the required course in philosophy has to focus, must be concentrated on, he insisted, black philosophers. He wanted the works of Cheikh Anta Diop, George G. M. James, Molefe Kete Asante, Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, Marcus Garvey, and John Henrik Clarke to be central
to the reading list. Students can study the other philosophers but only in relation to these men. Enough, he said, of the Eurocentric monopoly that has us studying our history and our intellectuals only by comparison to theirs.

Justin stood up and said that the men he had named were good thinkers but not philosophers. They could not replace Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Yes, he could see putting Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois on the list, and the African philosophers, Kwasi Wiredu and Paulin Hountondji, even Kwame Anthony Appiah from Harvard, Howard McGary from Rutgers, and Laurence Thomas from Syracuse. Martin Luther King, too.

“And Malcolm X?”

“A great man, but I wouldn’t compare his lectures to King’s great sermons.”

Banks was livid. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see? The only black men you would put on your list are the ones that the white man validates. Appiah from Harvard!” he snorted.

He called Justin an Uncle Tom, an Uncle Clarence Thomas Uncle Tom, the modern traitor to the progress of peoples of the black diaspora who wanted the inequities between blacks and whites to remain the way they were, who had vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

“For Chrissake, you are an American,” Justin shouted back at him. “You want inequities? Go to Africa. There should be enough inequities for you in Rwanda or Nigeria.”

Banks said he was a house nigger with a f’d up head. A bandana-wearing golliwog brainwashed by British Imperialism.

“We had empires when the English were still camped in caves, using clubs to hunt for food and women. Egypt was a thriving civilization three thousand years old before it crossed the minds of the Greeks to think up one. Who do you think taught the Greek philosophers? It was Africans. Read any book of those so-called Ancients, they’ll tell you who to thank.”

It was not a fight Justin could win. Passions were enflamed with the recent rounds of Giuliani’s cuts in the college’s budget; the mayor’s silence on the sodomizing of Abner Louima by some of the city’s finest; his attack on the character of Doris-mond, an innocent security guard gunned down by the NYPD; his refusal to meet with the parents of the slain Amadou Diallo, forty-one bullets pumped into his body by the mayor’s guards who claimed they thought it was a gun he had reached for, when it was his keys. Giuliani was no friend to black people. He wanted them out of his city. Racial pride was what was needed now, a strong dose of self-esteem in the face of this onslaught.

Justin held his tongue. His course was to be considered next, in next month’s meeting of the core curriculum meeting. He had just won his battle with the Great Books committee. He could not have that victory overturned by instigating Banks to revenge.

As it happened, he need not have worried. The following week Randall Robinson came to the college to talk about
The Debt
, the new book he was working on. It was his treatise on the urgency of reparations for the children of African slaves in the African diaspora.

“So what do you have to say about that?” Lloyd Banks
taunted him when they chanced to be in the bathroom at the same time during a break in Robinson’s presentation.

“As a matter of fact, I agree with Robinson,” Justin told him.

Lloyd Banks was astounded.

“Perhaps I don’t have his same arguments—the money is irrelevant to me—but on the matter of human dignity, we
must
demand reparations.”

For Justin the reason was simple. “Racism,” he said to Banks, “is essentially about the denial of another person’s humanity. Reparation is made to the families of Japanese Americans and to Jews exterminated by Hitler’s Nazis because we recognize that these were humans who were brutalized, not animals. Their humanity, their dignity as humans, demanded this acknowledgment, this recognition.”

“Well,” he said to Banks, “Africans are humans, and until America makes reparation for treating them as chattel, it will be hard to argue that this government is not racist, that it is not like the previous governments that shackled our forefathers and regarded them as property, not humans. A decision to grant reparations is no less than an acknowledgment of our humanity, a recognition that a grievous wrong had been done. It will spread its stain to all generations of white America until that acknowledgment is made. Reparation is the only language that has currency in America.”

“Yes,” Justin continued (they were in the hallway now), “even today we see how the world—NATO, in spite of the fact that an African heads the United Nations—treats the suffering of black people differently from the suffering of white people. Children!”

Justin had become so passionate, so incensed, that he stuttered, the word breaking into fragments when it left his mouth. “Children,” he said the word clearly now, are treated differently. “Children are of dying of malaria and sleeping sickness in Africa. Just some measly contribution from the rich, just some compassion, and they would live. These are treatable diseases, for God’s sake! We have the medicines to cure these diseases. These children could live.”

They were calling the audience back into the auditorium but Justin could not stop and Banks did not want him to.

“And I wasn’t even talking about AIDS,” he said. “Children are dying by the hundreds of thousands of AIDS in Africa. By the millions. In some villages the only inhabitants are children and old people. Everyone else is dead. And the children have the virus. But one article in the newspaper about the children in Romania who are dying of AIDS opens the floodgates. Thousands send money. I read where a woman who grew up in Calcutta sent money. The suffering of white children brought her to tears. In Calcutta, goddamnit, children are dying like flies from starvation. Food, Lloyd. Just food, that’s all they want. But that woman can send money to Romania! Not that I don’t think she shouldn’t, but she has made a value judgment about her own people. White children count more. No, Lloyd, if we are to uphold our dignity as humans, we must demand reparation. The lives of our forefathers have value. Their value is the same as that of every human being. Some of us may like to deny it, but we are the same: we come to this world from a place we can’t remember and we will return no matter how great we
think we are, how superior we are. Donald Trump will die just as will that child in the Congo.”

Banks was impressed. “And I thought you just lived in a make-believe world with all those make-believe books you read,” he said.

“Good literature gives us the big
T
truth,” Justin said. “I can’t say this for all writers, but the ones I admire have the courage to tell the big
T
truth about our common humanity.”

They ended up that night having dinner together in a restaurant and fantasizing.

“Imagine,” Banks said, “if Europeans had come to Africa to trade rather than enslave. Can you imagine where Africa could be today with the diamonds, gold, oil, and uranium it has? Or your country, Justin? Imagine if they had paid fair prices for the sugar cane and tobacco and cocoa they just took from your country.”

They became friends after that night, and then better friends when they discovered that they agreed on much more, though for different reasons. Lloyd Banks supported Affirmative Action. “If some horses leave the gate ahead of others, they are sure to win the race. If he didn’t get a handicap, you think Uncle Clarence Thomas Tom would have gotten into Yale?”