His mother beamed in response.
* * *
After dinner, he lay across his bed with his journal in his hands, his mind blank of anything to write. He was frozen there with an empty brain. He felt under his pillow for The Souls of Black Folk and found it, well-read and worn.
Like a Bible, the book usually opened directly to where he needed it to go. When the uniformed men had shown up on his doorstep to tell them of his father’s death, the book opened to the section entitled “Of the Passing of the First-Born.” He decided to reread that passage:
He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the western hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not, and the trees, the great green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train. The day changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the windows, the same green grass glinted in the setting sun. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most piteous thing—a childless mother.
That passage spoke deeper to Isaiah’s heart than any well-wisher’s condolence. Such things could only be written by someone who knew the heavy weight of true loss. Like Du Bois articulated miraculously, the shocking death of a loved one isn’t a wailing thing. The real shudder comes from the world moving on as if nothing’s happened. Shops flip their Closed signs to Open, patrons gather at the theaters and soda shops, and people dare smile at things that make them happy, while those left in the ruins find joy in nothing.
A tiny rock hit the sill of his bedroom window. For a moment, he thought it might be Angel. Then he caught himself in the dream and realized it must instead be Dorothy Mae.
She’d been voted Most Beautiful last year, even though she wasn’t technically allowed to be named that her sophomore year. She was an unlikely pencil-in candidate who actually won. And it was much deserved, too; Dorothy Mae was shockingly beautiful. She and Isaiah had been necking for months. Mostly touching, rarely talking. Whenever they stopped kissing, she had nothing much to say, and Isaiah would rather kiss than gossip. Besides, he was under enough pressure from Muggy to speak ill of others, he certainly didn’t want to do it with her, too. So they kissed until their lips went purple and tingly. Still, he’d never written a single poem about Dorothy Mae.
“Hey,” he heard her singsongy voice through his closed window.
“Damn,” he said aloud, knowing what that meant. She was on her way up the leggy tree outside of his bedroom. He needed to write. Even a little, quickly. He cracked the window and began writing as she slowly and carefully climbed in her frilly dress.
Hey there, Miss miss:
Please stay where you are,
Miss miss, you don’t know me at all.
Don’t throw rocks, don’t kiss.
No offense, Miss miss,
But there’s better than this,
Much better, there’s bliss.
Miss miss, I like,
Black Angel, I love, Miss miss, I need you to know.
Please go, Miss miss.
You’ll be somebody’s Mrs.
Not mine, Miss miss.
Not even close.
There. He’d written his first poem about Dorothy Mae, and while it wasn’t anything special, it revealed how he truly felt about her on the hidden inside. As poetry does.
Isaiah heard a small rasping sound on his bedroom window. It was Dorothy Mae’s bright pink manicured fingernail scraping a heart against the glass. He shut his journal and walked over to raise his window so she could clamber inside.
“Come in,” he said, trying to sound light and airy while feeling heavy with grief and craving for someone the polar opposite to Dorothy Mae.
He slid the window down after her and stared at her for a brief moment, hoping she’d say something worth hearing.
As she leaned in to kiss him, he dodged. “Have a seat,” he said, bouncing around the bed like a kangaroo. “I have to run to the toilet.”
He didn’t have to go to the toilet at all. He just needed time to think and analyze his own reflection in the mirror. “Come on, man,” he told himself. “The town Sheba’s in your bed.”
But his body reacted in ways it never had before. Tiny beads of sweat seeped from his neat hairline and dried before they reached his brow. His bottom lip trembled like he wanted to vomit. And his right hand shook with the instinct to write, or maybe to read; either way, he wanted to disappear somehow into words. To forget the predicament he found himself in.
Looking in the mirror, he saw weakness all over him. Too weak to tell a beautiful young woman in the next room that he was no longer interested in her and that maybe he never had been. Bank’s closed! He should’ve been brave enough to say aloud but wasn’t. Simultaneously, he was too weak to release such feelings and fade away into the desires of every man his age. Just kiss the broad. What are you, lame? Muggy would’ve surely asked him. And yes would certainly be the answer. He was lame.
He exhaled loudly at the mirror. “Come on, Isaiah,” he said. “Come! On!”
But there was no use. He simply did not want Dorothy Mae any longer. He wanted Angel, and if he couldn’t have her, he wanted to devour words on a page. He closed his eyes and attempted to focus his confused mind.
The hardest of truths was that the conflict inside him was placed on him by humanity, and the deepest weakness was he wanted to succumb to it. To give in to the perception of what society thought he should be—more like Muggy Little Jr.—interested only in the pleasures of now and uncaring for the steadiness of his people’s future. He wasn’t like Du Bois at all. He wasn’t even like Booker T. Washington. No revolutionary cared so much how they were seen within the flawed world. They only cared for repairing it. They would lay down their lives to make an attempt at valuable change, not tease tears in a tiny toilet over kissing a girl.
A cry burned at the corner of Isaiah’s eye, and he blinked it away before it could fully materialize.
“No!” he said to his reflection. “You will not.”
He closed his eyes and searched his mind for an appropriate segment from Souls to distract him. When he thought of one, he reopened his eyes and unblinkingly recited it to himself:
“‘He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another … He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another … He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.’”
He lost count of how many times he’d said it. He would’ve continued, but he heard a small, concerned knock on the door.
“You okay in there, baby?” his mother said softly.
He blinked at her sweet voice. “I’m okay!” he lied. “Be out soon.”
With one last look, he threw a cold splash of water on his face and considered the words he’d repeated over and over. Profound, strong, true, and wholly empty when spoken aloud by Isaiah himself. They needed a revolutionary to speak them, someone worthy, not him. Words alone held no sway. They didn’t carry whips and chains, or yell halt to adversaries without someone worthy to speak them.
So with one last breath, he forced himself to go back into his room to kiss the girl he didn’t want to kiss.