Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,145

them, didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure what sort of response I would’ve let loose if they came trundling up alongside me. But another part of me thought that Claire at least should have kept after me, I deserved that much, I wanted her to come tap me on the shoulder and beg a second time so that I knew it mattered, like our boys mattered. And I didn’t want that to be the end of things for my boys.

I looked up the avenue. Park was gray and wide and there was a small rise of hill up ahead, a stepping-stone of traffic lights. I tightened the buckles on my shoes and stepped out into the crosswalk.

—

WHEN I LEFT MISSOURI, I was seventeen years old, and I made my way to Syracuse, where I survived on an academic scholarship. I fared pretty well, even if I say so myself. I had gifts for putting together some fine written sentences, and I could juggle a good slice of American history, and so—like a few young colored women my age—we were invited to elegant rooms, places with wooden panels and flickering candles and fine crystal glasses, and we were asked to give opinions on what had happened to our boys over Anzio, and who W.E.B. Du Bois was, and what it really meant to be emancipated, and how the Tuskegee Airmen came about, and what Lincoln would think of our achievements. People listened to our answers with that glazed-over look in their eyes. It was like they really wanted to believe what was being said in their presence, but they couldn’t believe they were present for it.

Late in the evenings I played the piano stiffly, but it was as if they wanted jazz to leap from my fingers. This was not the Negro they expected. Sometimes they would look up, jolted, as if they’d just brought themselves, cold, out from a dream.

We were ushered to the door by the dean of one school or another. I could tell the parties only really began after the door closed and we were gone.

After visiting those splendid houses, I didn’t want to go back to my little dorm room anymore. I walked around the city, down by Thornden Park and out to White Chapel gardens, sometimes until the blue dawn rose, wearing holes in my shoes.

Most of the rest of my college days were spent clutching my school satchel close to my chest and pretending not to hear the suggestions of the fraternity boys who wouldn’t have minded a colored woman for a trophy: they had a safari intent to them.

Sure, I ached for the backroads of my hometown in Missouri, but leaving behind a scholarship would’ve been a defeat for my folks, who had no idea what it was like for me—they who thought their little girl was up north learning the truth of America in the sort of place where a young woman could cross the thresholds of the rich. They told me that my southern charm would get me by. My father wrote letters that began: My Little Glorious. I wrote back on airmail paper. I told them how much I loved my history classes, which was true. I told them I loved walking the woods, true too. I told them that I always had clean linen in my dorm room, true as well.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

Still, I graduated with honors. I was one of the first colored women at Syracuse to do so. I went up the steps, looked down on the crowd of gowns and hats, emerged into a stunned applause. A light rain fell across the college courtyard. I stepped past my college mates, terrified. My mother and father, up from Missouri, hugged me. They were old and ruined and held each other’s hands as if they were just one piece. We went to a Denny’s to celebrate. My mother said that we’d come a long way, us and our people. I shrank back down in the seat. They had packed the car so there was space for me in the back. No, I told them. I’d rather stay a little while as long as they didn’t mind, I wasn’t ready to return just yet. “Oh,” they said, in unison, grinning just a little, “you’re a Yankee now?” It was a grin that held pain—I guess you’d call it a grimace.

My mother, in the passenger seat, adjusted the rearview mirror as they