Page 17 of You've Got a Place Here, Too
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Celine says, her grin popping deep dimples in her smooth cheeks, “since you have an army of elbow-patch blazers. Someone should tell you that you aren’t actually a real professor.”
I grab her around the waist and sit on the bed, bringing her down to my lap.
“I was real enough to pull you, wasn’t I?” I nuzzle into the sweet-smelling curve of her neck and run my hand over the tight svelteness of her back under the silk.
She turns on my lap, looping her arms over my shoulders and straddling me, the panels of her robe falling away to display smooth brown thighs.
“You didn’t pull me, Dr. Lowe.” She leans forward and takes my earlobe between her lips, sending a strike of pleasure down my body. “I pulled you, or have you forgotten?”
“But I was the one who took a chance and asked you out at that job fair. Give me credit for that.”
“You want credit?” The undulation of her hips over me is shallow but still makes my breath catch and my hand tighten at her waist. “I think I should get credit for risking my heart a second time and giving you a shot after five years.”
“I’ll be late for my own book launch if you keep that up,” I groan. “And I give you plenty of credit. Didn’t I dedicate my book to you so the whole world knows how whipped I am?”
She smiles, and it’s soft and loving, and the look I always imagined on the woman I would spend the rest of my life with.
“Brave the Skieswill be your next bestseller.” She leans in to capture my lips with hers, opening so I can slip inside to taste her sweetness before pulling back, her eyes dancing. “And you’re welcome for that title.”
“You actually inspired my first book, too, with your boldness, your freshness, your spirit. And now you’ve inspired my third by agreeing to be my wife.” I caress the soft bevel of her cheekbone. “I wonder if I’ll ever be able to write another book without you.”
“Since we have each other,” she says, laying her head on my shoulder and bringing our linked fingers to rest over her heart, “you don’t ever have to try.”
Who Teaches Black Boys How to Love?
Aaron Foley
There’s no room in Detroit for a boy who does too much. You gather your dreams and debts, pack them in a hand-me-down Hartmann, and fly off to the bigger city, just like Tracy did in the classic movieMahogany.Tracy wasn’t from Detroit, she was from Chicago. Diana Ross, who played Tracy, was from Detroit though, the would-be queen of Motown Records straight from the Brewsters.
Desmond Matthews didn’t grow up in the Brewster Projects, but damn near close enough, and rough enough, in the King Homes off Lafayette. There, he’d pretend Tracy was from Detroit, and that the peace Martin Luther King Jr. prayed for actually existed in the subsidized housing that bore his name. There, there was so much for him to do that he knew he had to leave.
WatchingMahoganyon repeat was already too much. So was the following: Helping your grandmother and your sister, both a size eleven in women’s, pick out shoes that would look good on them. Color coordinating your sister’s outfits, helping her with her hair, showing her Grandma’s beauty tricks—using lipstick as a quick blush, or witch hazel to dry out pimples. Doodling, constantly. Creating lookbooks and mood boards from ad circulars, Avon catalogs, and magazines swiped from doctors’ offices.Trying out for the dance team and being rejected. Trying out for the cheer team and being rejected. Asking to put on a fashion show and use the cafeteria as a runway and being rejected.
Who teaches Black boys how to love, anyway? Especially the ones who love other boys? They’re told to hold open doors and walk on the side of the sidewalk nearest the street, and that’s what love is. Perhaps Desmond would learn to love—to find it, to practice it, to live in it—elsewhere. After heartbreak came enrollment. After tears came scholarship applications. And after this degree, he told himself, he would be packing up his suitcase and going destination: anywhere, just like the Marvelettes once said.
That’s why he didn’t have time to fool with the early-thirtysomething guy in the back of his Intro to Business Management class who kept staring him down in the beginning of the semester.
“I know you,” he said after the first day.
“Man, I don’t think we ever met,” Desmond responded in his most try-hard masculine voice.
“You used to come to Club Heaven with that tall white boy. I play records there on Saturdays.”
Desmond said he must be mistaken, and he never heard of a Club Heaven in Detroit. The deejay asked if he was sure. Then the deejay said it was okay, he wouldn’t tell. Then Desmond relaxed his shoulders and asked if he just happened to be playing records this coming Saturday, and the deejay responded he just might be.
There’s no tolerance for a lazy Black man in Detroit. Folks worked too hard to get here from the red clay spotted with bloodspecks from whips and cotton sprigs, feet calloused from tending land and running from horsemen who only ride in darkness. Motor City men ride, for lack of a better term, until the wheels fall off. For Wilbur—he hated his name, sounding too much like places the great migrants intentionally left behind—he always had to have a backup plan. He couldn’t put his hands to work anymore at Dodge Main assembly plant after the layoffs. The Japanese were putting their hands to better use and making cars all Americans—except Detroiters—actually wanted to buy. Wilbur couldn’t rest, so he immediately enrolled at Lewis.
The laid-off Black auto workers were flocking to Lewis College of Business for another way up. They found their velocity at the only Black college in the state of Michigan that fast-tracked folks to accounting offices and IBM terminals. The women wanted off the assembly lines and into the secretary pools. Men, always wanting more, wanted the office with a secretary. Wilbur wanted to be the next Berry Gordy, even though Gordy hadn’t been seen in Detroit for about a decade, ever since he hightailed it to Los Angeles.
There was a girl at the plant, Valencia, who also got laid off, that was performing some nights at Club Heaven. Wilbur thought he could make her his own Diana. He’d play instrumentals of the newest singles at the club, and she’d sing along—after he’d coached her on vocal tricks and techniques backstage, showing her when best to belt that soprano she’d developed singing in Second Baptist over in Greektown and when to rein it in.
“I wish you liked me for more than my voice,” Valencia said.
“And what makes you think I don’t?” Wilbur asked.
“You ain’t got to be honest with me now but do me a favor and be honest with yourself some point soon.”
A Detroit man at Wilbur’s age—twenty-nine—should have afamily to support by now. But he had no kids, no wife, not even a girlfriend. No one ever questioned it until they did. “I’m not trying to be tied down,” Wilbur would say, and it was as easy as that. It was also easy to conceal that Valencia had been the only one of his plant co-workers who knew of his Saturday-night moonlighting at Club Heaven, so long as he never told anyone where she was that following Sunday morning.
