There were only three tenants at Mrs Gilliam’s boarding house on Pine Street. The three men lived on the second floor of the white three-story structure. It was not for lack of applicants that the third floor was empty, but because Mrs Gilliam was very particular about her roomers.
Earl had always considered himself highly fortunate when he thought about how quickly Mrs Gilliam had taken him in. At the end of the previous school year he had decided not to leave Sutton, but to take a job as a mechanic at the nearby computer factory. All at once the dormitories were closing for the summer and he was without a place to stay. It was then that he remembered Zeke, the Black handyman, who had often mentioned his room at Mrs Gilliam’s, where he also took his meals. With three days remaining before school closed Earl had gone to see her. The two of them had hit it off immediately.
Mrs Gilliam was sixty years old. A short, gray-haired, thickly built matron of a woman who had lived in Sutton for thirty years. Her husband had been a conductor on the ICC railroad, making runs from Miami to Chicago on the Seminole, when she met him. She was a waitress at a coffee shop in Kankakee, Illinois, and after having seen the big, raw-boned Black man twice a week over a six-month period, they married. The railroad rerouted Charles Gilliam soon after, and his route carried him through Sutton and other parts of southern Appomattox County in Virginia. He bought an impressive three-story frame home on Pine Street and started his family. He had been working for the line nearly twenty-six years when he died of a heart attack.
His wife, Dora, thrived on company. She was a cornerstone at Mt. Moriah A.M.E. Church and the head of her sewing circle. Soon after her husband’s death she began to take in tenants, mostly for the companionship it provided.
Earl had made Mrs Gilliam break one of her cardinal rules. She had vowed never to rent rooms to college students. For the most part she considered them to be impolite, disrespectful young men with no idea of the meaning of the word responsibility. Earl was somewhat different. In the first place he was working his way through school and intended to add his summer’s earnings to a partial scholarship. Secondly, he was as polite and mannerly a young man as Mrs Gilliam had ever met. And he had looked so let down when she told him, quite gruffly, that she didn’t rent to college students, that she had had no choice but to invite him in for a cup of coffee to better explain her position. Somehow over coffee the word ‘college’ came to mean more to her than it had meant before. It took on the meaning of her dead husband’s unfulfilled dreams. She found it very easy to overlook the fact that Earl was a student. She even rationalized her decision by pointing out the fact that he wouldn’t be a student during the summer, but when September rolled around there was no mention of Earl moving out.
As Earl combed his head of thick hair his mind ran through the maze of emotions that gripped him, identifying first one and then the other. Jealousy? Fear? Anger? Anger was the most predominant. He felt as though he had been betrayed. Not betrayed by friends, but by that insidious ‘Brother’ term. MJUMBE subjugated the entire campus into one giant malignancy and classified all constituents under the heading of ‘Brother.’ The word seemed to have less meaning every day. Long ago he had decided that he would not be a part of the group that criticized the hypocrisy without an alternative. Who was sure how it felt to be Black? Maybe running your tongue over the word ‘Brother’ a thousand times a day was a step in the right direction.
Earl felt the muscles at the hinges of his mouth tightening to form knots of energy. He looked like a cracker ballplayer on the Baseball Game of the Week with a quarter package of Bull O’ the Woods chewing tobacco poking his mouth out a foot and nowhere to spit.
He knew he must not allow himself the luxury of rage. He knew he could never accomplish anything that way; barging into the MJUMBE meeting room and screaming, ‘Just what the fuck is everybody tryin’ to pull?’ He decided to play it New York-style. Be cool. They had him by the balls. Everybody knew that. But if he acted as though he didn’t know it or didn’t care he might be able to jive them into a mistake. Then what? He didn’t even know if he wanted them to make a mistake. He couldn’t decide which side of the fence he was on.
He thought about the election that had taken place the previous spring. When March rolled around and the first signs about nomination procedures were pinned on dormitory bulletin boards he had thought little of it. He had never run for a school office and often thought that the only reason he had been a high school basketball captain was because he was the only returning letterman his senior year. But one afternoon after a heated argument between him and his Political Science teacher he had been halted in the hall by a classmate he knew only by sight.
‘Excuse me, brother,’ the other had said. ‘My name is Roy Dean, but people here call me Lawman. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.’
‘Sure,’ Earl had replied, caught off guard. ‘I’m Earl Thomas.’
‘I know,’ Lawman said as they started walking. ‘I couldn’t help but know you after all the hell you raise in Poli Sci.’
‘The man bugs me.’
‘Me, too … where were you goin’? You got a class?… how ’bout a cup of coffee in the SUB on me?’
‘All right,’ Earl said a bit hesitantly.
‘Poli Sci is my major,’ Lawman said, going on. ‘Everybody calls me Lawman because I’m thinking seriously of going into law … we used to have a thing called ‘The Courtroom’ when we were freshmen. If somebody on our wing of the dorm did something questionable, like trying to steal another cat’s woman or something like that, we would have a mock trial. I was a laywer for the defense.’
‘You win a lot of cases?’
‘It was just a joke, but I pulled a lot of fast ones on the jury. Most of law is just semantics anyway. You can say a thing one way and make it sound entirely different from the way it appears if you rearrange a few words.’
‘I guess so,’ Earl agreed.
‘But what I wanted to talk to you about was your political thing,’ Lawman continued.
‘My political thing?’ Earl laughed. ‘I don’t really guess I have one. Just trying to be Black, I guess.’
The two of them walked on toward the Student Union Building, leaving Washington Hall where liberal arts classes were taught, Carver Hall, the science building, Adler Annex, and the mini-square referred to by students as the ‘quadrangle,’ where students sat and studied and talked on the benches.
‘Sutton is fucked up,’ Lawman began as they entered the crowded Student Union Building. ‘A lotta in quotes Black schools are fucked up, but they seem to be gettin’ something done about their problems. If Sutton is doing anythin’ it’s digressin’, you know what I mean?’
Earl nodded.
‘This school was founded in eighteen eighty-three and for all intents and purposes it’s still eighteen eighty-three here, because there hasn’t been much progress.’
‘What about the things the Student Government president, Peabody, planned to do?’ Earl asked as they left the service area with their coffee.
‘Peabody ain’ nuthin’ but a lot of mouth,’ Lawman snorted. ‘What I mean is that the man is disorganized. He’s spent the whole year havin’ Calhoun twist his mind around like a rubber band … he goes to Calhoun and sez: “The students want this and that.” Calhoun laughs and sez: “So what?” You dig?’
Earl nodded for Lawman to continue.
‘So next month ther’s gonna be another Student Government election and something needs to be done …’