The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart Read Free Page B

For fifteen minutes he grilled her about whose car she was driving and whether it was stolen. I sat in the car, leaning out the window. I had such a feeling of déjà vu. Should I get out of the car and stand beside her? Or should I remain in my seat? Even though this was San Francisco in the Nineties and not Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Sixties, I found myself suddenly grappling with a dilemma I thought we had put to rest twenty-five years ago. What is the proper behavior during confrontations with obviously disrespectful, hostile police? If I got out of the car and questioned what was happening and was ordered to get back inside, and refused, what were likely to be the consequences? How could they be dealt with nonviolently, when he was the only one of us armed?
    My friend’s face was tense with suffering as she rummaged through a rather messy glove compartment for proof of ownership of her car. Having called in her information and verified ownership, he explained why he thought her vehicle might have been stolen: a sticker on her license plate seemed haphazardly placed.
    Throughout their exchange the policeman, white, solidly built, with cold eyes and a graying mustache, showed no sign of human feeling.

    “And why would I have stolen this battered little car,” my friend said, when we were finally free to go. “And not a new BMW or a Mercedes-Benz?”
    On we went to see
The Bridges of Madison County
. A wonderful movie that reminded me of you, of us, the summer we met in Jackson, Mississippi. When I think of that summer I think of how perfectly my hair was straightened, and how neatly shaped. I think of the tiny, sexy dresses I wore. Dresses that bared my shoulders and rose above my knees. Dresses that said “Africa” in a seductive whisper, not like the dresses I would later wear, that I made myself, from yards of vibrant fabric that made me feel like a member of a distant tribe. I shaved legs and underarms in those days, and was silky smooth all over. I had barely enough money to exist, but I did not care. Being in the South, in Mississippi, was what mattered. Not missing what was happening there. And almost immediately, we met.
    It was like a dream, really. And also karmic. I was one of those who complained bitterly about white people having the nerve to be in “our” movement. And yet of course I noticed you immediately, as a man. Your warm congenial manner in the café next to the law office on Farrish Street, as you shared lunch with your colleagues. Your laughter and flushed face above a crisp, cool blue shirt. Later you would tell me you noticed me too. I would have been in the company of Larry, * the lawyer for whom you worked, and whose errands you were required to run. He had picked me up at the airport, and remained near, “showing mearound.” An arrogant, rich Yalie in his thirties whose father owned a chain of hardware stores, Larry drove a blue Mercedes convertible as if he were lord of the world, and would later squire me about in it; as if this were something Mississippi saw every day: a handsome, suavely dressed white man and a fashionably dressed young black woman who was actually perplexed to wind up, briefly, in his bed.
    But there was no feeling, with Larry. Besides, he was engaged, I had thought, to the black woman who partly inspired me to come to Mississippi in the first place. Which made his seduction of me all the more puzzling. Not to mention my sleepwalker’s response. I don’t even remember having sex with him. I remember only a moment of standing next to a motel bed on which he lay waiting for me, and that I was wearing peach-colored bikini panties and a low-cut bra. He pretended an enthusiasm for what would come next that I felt sure he didn’t feel. I did the same. I was embarrassed to be part of whatever game he was playing with the woman who loved him. And yet, in those days, sex was casual and often meaningless, simply because that’s what it meant to be a person of those