I’ve only been there for a year, but that’s enough to know it’s where I belong. After Christmas break, I swore I’d never go back to Tennessee. I stuck around at Barnard for the summer session even though my father sent three letters pleading for me to come back. He’s been terribly lonely since my mother died three years ago.
But I couldn’t face that house again. My little brother, counting down the days until he’s old enough to enlist. My grandmother, nagging me to get my hair done and to hurry up and find a husband so I can come back home.
The sky is so dim it’s nearly dark. A new chant starts up at the front of the line. It echoes to the back so slowly we can’t even tell what they’re saying at first.
“Having a boyfriend isn’t automatically conventional,” I tell Diane. “I like Floyd.”
“Do you really?” Diane says. “Do you love him?”
I laugh. “Now who’s the conventional one?”
That’s one of the things that’s always frustrated me about Diane. She takes this all so seriously. Everything has to be a profound statement on something. If it isn’t politics, it’s love.
Floyd is a lot of things, but profound isn’t one of them. Floyd’s feet are flat on the ground. Flat is a good word for Floyd, generally. He’s been pretty good about taking me out on dates and being nice to me at parties, but I can’t shake the feeling that he likes the idea of dating the black freshman girl with the natural hair more than he likes the actual me.
I thought Daddy would be glad to see I had a boyfriend. A man to take care of me in the big city. It turned out I was wrong.
My father found some cheap hotel in Harlem, but he could only stay for two days before he had to get back to work at the factory. We went on the Staten Island Ferry and baked in the heat while my father looked at the city skyline and shook his head as though he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I ordered takeout from my favorite Chinese restaurant and we ate it on the floor of my dorm room, my father fumbling with unfamiliar chopsticks. His eyes darted across the rows of thick textbooks with complicated titles, the ashtrays scattered around the room, the stacks of albums with longhaired white men on their covers. He was trying, I knew, but he didn’t understand why I’d chosen this world over the only one he’d ever known.
When I introduced them, Floyd was polite, respectful, friendly. He went to prep school in Massachusetts, so he knew to wear a tie and call my father “sir.” But he didn’t know not to put his hand on the small of my back as we crossed the street to the fancy restaurant he’d picked out for dinner. When he touched me, I swear I saw Daddy’s heart break right in front of me.
“STREETS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE!” The new chant has finally reached us. “STREETS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE!”
I join in, shouting along with the others. The hippie girl does too, her voice low and gravelly.
Diane leans in to talk into my ear. I wish I couldn’t hear her over the chanting, but I can. I could probably pick out Diane’s voice in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“Tell me the truth,” she says. “Tell me the real reason you picked him instead of me.”
I sigh again, trying come up with some explanation about how much I like Floyd. Then I see Diane’s face out of the corner of my eye. Her eyes are wide and pleading.
She wants the truth. She deserves the truth.
“Everyone would look at us,” I say slowly. Diane blinks. For a second I think she didn’t understand me, but then she starts to draw back, pulling her arm away from where it’s linked with mine, and I know she heard. “If we were together for real. They’d stare at me everywhere I went. I’d know they were talking about me, and I’d know what they were saying.”
Diane looks straight into my eyes for a long moment.
“That’s what matters to you?” she finally says. “What people you don’t even know say behind your back? What about what I think? Don’t I count more than whoever walks by you on Riverside Drive?”
“Of course.” I don’t know what she wants me to say. I gaze down, which only reminds me of how disheveled I look. The sleeves of my blue button-down are wrinkled and stained. I fell in the dirt back at the band shell when the cops first charged. Diane stayed behind to help me up and got kicked in the leg by a cop for her trouble. “It’s just — I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
Diane pulls back again, like she’s about to leave. I want to reach out and take her hand. I don’t.
“WHOSE STREET? OUR STREET! WHOSE STREET? OUR STREET!”
The chant is getting louder. Angrier. Fists are waving in the air above us.
“They didn’t get the permit for the march!” the hippie girl shouts next to us. “It’s over!”
It looks like she’s right. There’s fury roiling in the front of the line, filtering its way to the back along with the chant. One of the marshals shouts into his bullhorn for people to stay calm.
“We should go!” I shout to Diane. At first she ignores me, but then she glances my way and nods.
I let go of the hippie’s arm. Diane and I slip out of the line and into the trees with some of the other marchers.