Nat had grown extremely protective of Darlene, and as the attacks against her continued, their social world shrank and their bond intensified. He claimed responsibility for everything that happened to her and insisted on leaving school along with her. Darlene and Nat arranged with their professors to complete as many finals and papers as they could while missing a few classes and took steps to transfer to Centenary, in Shreveport, explaining as little to their families as possible, evading any questions about their relationship. Nat’s excitement grew at the thought of transferring when he found out that Centenary had a basketball team with great potential—the Gentlemen, a name that made Darlene laugh. The NCAA was punishing the Gents, he said, by failing to report their statistics; Nat had met a Centenary player named Robert Parish, a center, who had one of the best records in college ball, but nobody knew. To Darlene it sounded like Nat had more disappointment and injustice in store, but she donated an empty smile to his efforts anyway.
Even before the semester ended, they fled to Shreveport, living together not because other young unmarried couples had begun to make it fashionable, but because they had nobody else to rely on. Darlene’s sister, Bethella, was the only other family member who had gone to college before her, and she’d run off to Houston and never turned back. Darlene felt she couldn’t return to her family’s country ways after taking on all her college-girl habits and aspirations. The last time she’d gone home, her older brother, himself a high-school dropout, had pushed her psychology textbook off the table while she was studying and later, at the same dining-room table, told everybody how proud he was of her. Still, she had never gotten the highest grades, and her banishment dampened her mood and lowered her academic standing. It could’ve been worse; Nat’s adoptive father, Puma, a religious and shrewd man, figured out the whole story, and what he called Nat’s profligacy, mendacity, and premarital fornication disgusted him so thoroughly that he wouldn’t allow his son back home.
Afraid of campus housing at Centenary, after a few months, they found a small house with a wide yard on Joe Louis Boulevard. While talking to a new neighbor, they heard that Holiday in Dixie would begin that night. It was a lackluster, month-late shadow of Mardi Gras; that event truly happened only in New Orleans, but this second-rate party welcomed them in a way that Grambling never would again. Even the lukewarm gumbo bought from a truck stand filled their heads with the memory of hotter spice and juicier andouille, and though the salmon in their beggar’s pouches was all gray flesh and skin, the oily phyllo still flaked properly against their teeth, and that provided just enough comfort. They felt they had made the right choice.
Despite the loss and shame of leaving Grambling, Darlene felt she had won whenever she glanced at Nat. He’d agreed to go with her when he could have stayed and forsaken her along with the rest. He’d settled for a less impressive basketball scholarship. Words can’t prove true love, she would think, only the list of sacrifices you make to keep it alive. Nat had demonstrated his love through his honor.
Nat didn’t know much about his real parents, only his mother’s first name. The agency might have known more, but they refused to release any information to him. His foster parents had adopted him at thirteen, after the system had pinballed him through unstable East Texas homes where supposed brothers stole his baseball cards, mothers beat his shins with pool cues, and sisters tied him to chairs as a playtime activity. Only his growth spurt put an end to the abuse. Out of the six homes he passed through, he’d wanted to stay in only two of them, the first belonging to an affectionate divorcée with apple-shaped hips, the second to the family who ultimately adopted him, the Hardisons: his foster mother LaVerne, a tubby young woman with freckles and keloids scattered on her skin; his adoptive father, Patrick, nicknamed Puma, a sturdy throne of a man the color and complexion of a walnut, a tense and authoritarian ex-Marine whose tough love contained very little of the latter ingredient. From Puma, Nat absorbed a fervent admiration for the military and respect for authority, as well as the desire to emulate the straight-backed heroes of Iwo Jima and Korea.
Their few new friends at Centenary did not know that Nat and Darlene’s intense and somewhat paranoid bond had arisen from their persecution at Grambling. On a double date, a couple they knew from the Black Students’ Union stared when they shared from one plate and when Nat rose to let Darlene out of the booth to go to the bathroom and then followed her to the door. They joked uncomfortably when the two returned, but Nat couldn’t see what they found so unusual. Darlene mentioned shyly that they had registered for most classes together too.
We’re both majoring in econ, she said, and we help each other through all the madness. I make flash cards for us. It’s fun. We’re practically the same person now.
Their supper companions smiled and changed the subject, and they often had standing plans when Darlene contacted them in the future.
Almost concurrently with their banishment from Grambling, a deputy in Pensacola had shot a black man dead at point-blank range with a .357 Magnum. A little later, someone strangled a material witness who’d said that she had a relationship with the deputy and had seen the murder. By the end of January, the grand jury had acquitted the deputy. Hundreds of people took to the streets in Pensacola, but seventy policemen beat them with clubs. Nat followed all of this and became outraged; he showed as much anger over these events as he had about what had happened to Darlene, and she wondered if he was letting Pensacola stand in for the earlier, more personal injustice. Now he insisted that they had to work for equality, even on a small scale. Then Darlene realized that she was pregnant, the child probably conceived a week or so after they’d decided to transfer from Grambling.