Читать книгу What We Lose - Zinzi Clemmons - Страница 28

I met Devonne in my first year at college. Fresh out of my monochrome hometown, where white was right and everything black was wrong, stupid, and ugly (I was a nonentity), I felt like meeting her was a coming-home. She was intelligent, fierce. She wore her hair in neat dreads. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, starched men’s shirts, and designer loafers. She was sharp.

On the first day of our first-year orientation, the administration crammed our entire class into an auditorium, and when they asked if we had any questions, Devonne stood and recited a spoken-word poem, which she would later tell me she revised from one she had performed at slams in high school.

You don’t see me when you pass me in the hallways,

Not the real me,

I’m just a black girl to you, with

Tough nails and

Tough voice.

I’m here.

There was a stunned silence, and then enthusiastic applause. My stomach lurched when she strode into my Africana Studies class the following Monday. I hung around after class, waiting for her to finish her conversation with the professor about Marcus Garvey. (He was a world-class bigot. I won’t celebrate him, she said as our professor beamed at her.)

“I think you’re right about Garvey,” I said as she walked toward me. She smiled.

“Oh yeah?” she said. “Walk with me.”

I told her that where I’d come from, my views and my skin made me a lonely little island. I told her I felt so happy to meet someone like her.

She just nodded along. “You know how many people told me that this week?” We stopped at a forked path on the college green. “I’m headed to the library. I’ll catch you later.”

I was sure that was the last conversation I would have with her, but the next day, I heard someone call my name from across the cafeteria. Devonne came bounding toward me, her dreads bouncing in the air, feet slightly splayed in her loafers.

She dropped a small paperback of C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley on my tray.

“I brought this for you.” She smiled, out of breath. “Where are you sitting?”

Our friendship burned fast and bright from there. Each day we would find each other in the library and spend hours in the stacks reading side by side. We took cigarette breaks together and marveled at the broody boys who kept us company outside, speculating on the love lives of the ones who offered us their lighters.

“I bet he’s great in bed,” Devonne would say, or, “SDS: Small Dick Syndrome. Did you see the way he fixed his hair constantly? Insecure.”

“You’re terrible,” I’d reply, snickering.

At some point she noticed that they showed me more attention. One offered me a cigarette and not her; another spoke to us both, but kept his eyes on me.

“I didn’t think you were interested,” I’d say.

“Of course I’m not interested,” she’d say.

Our friendship ended in the same place it started: in Africana Studies class. We all did oral presentations: Devonne spoke on Marcus Garvey, advancing her thesis that he should be treated in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini. It was bold but with noticeable gaps in thinking. I did a short presentation on Toni Cade Bambara, including an analysis of her role as the editor of notable anthologies of women’s writing. After class, the professor approached me.

“Nice work,” he said.

I looked around for Devonne, but she had already left. She wasn’t in the hallway, or outside in the parking lot, where we normally had a cigarette after class. She wasn’t in the library that day either.

When I saw her the next week, she told me that she’d slept with one of the boys we’d met outside the library who had looked at me. Though she’d feigned disinterest at first, she’d actually slept with him several times. She said she was in love.

“What a jerk,” I exclaimed.

Devonne stared at me, as if she was trying to decode something inside me.

“Yeah,” she said slowly. She flicked her cigarette and turned briskly without her normal air kiss or sarcastic comment, and, for all intents and purposes, she was gone.