On the Green River, South Williamstown, Massachusetts (By John Lee Fitch, 1836-1895)
CHAPTER 2
Like a wild mare, I bolted from the walls of Williams College and my stifled confusion to a free-running river partly shaded by greening willows, cottonwoods and maples. Clear water rolling over the stones hummed its own eternal gentle-lapping lullaby. What music could be sweeter? I loved it there at the Green River.
I found myself a slab of ridged gray schist in the sun and lay down my books. Then I sat cross-legged, my bottom warmed by the rock, with a book propped down center. I arched my narrow back and long neck to stare up into the blue on that glorious first day of a long-awaited spring, knowing that the cold and snow could return at any time.
The sun’s vitality coaxed me to strip off my vintage military green coat trimmed with epaulets. Still, I clung to my emerald sweater. I yearned someday soon to cast off all my winter clothing like a snake in the tropics shedding its skin. I dreaded winter, that quiet time of death. In my childhood, I thought the season unnatural. At Williams, I had learned to luxuriate in the valley’s lush gardens of snow and the mountains’ jagged skyline of purple majesty. A New Yorker via the Caribbean, I had grown accustomed to the alien beauty. Yet, it took no practice for me to relish that splendid day in May. The air smelled delicious of white, blue and yellow wildflowers dotting the landscape with whimsey, a miraculous gift of life after the incubation of snow. It was lovely in Williamstown.
If only there were no people.
The life of a hermit appealed to me. In Catholic school, I had been taught the lives of saints who had been recluses – people like St. Francis of Assisi who was so gentle that wild animals strained to be near him. These saints seemed to be the kindest and the most sensitive: too soft for the harshness of the world. Devoted to God through their fervent love, these men and women cloistered themselves in beauty and harmony. When I was younger, I had wondered about life as a religious. Not as a nun, but as a monk. I imagined that I would engage in conversation only at meals, which would be taken outdoors amidst gardens bursting with fruit and flowers. Although I would spend most of my time by myself, I would never be alone accompanied by Leadbelly’s taut blues and Mozart’s unstoppered joy.
Then, you kissed your way into my life, and I could not imagine a day without you. My lifelong friend and confidante. My lover. My dear.
I looked down at the book on my legs and lost myself in the rapture of reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. How easy was it to deny that anything was amiss when I threw myself into my work. So engrossed was I in the philosopher’s thoughts of faith that I did not hear you approach.
“Hello there,” you said, friendly and hopeful that I would ask you to join me.
We tried not to assume or demand anything of each other.
“Sit down. Please,” I said graciously, flustered by your desire.
Like the sky above and the river below, you were God’s creation. Your sepia eyes reflected the pastoral splendor like an old photograph. How I loved you. I took a break from Soren’s writings and surveyed the paradise while leaning into the long, sinewy arms of you, my partner.
We took good care of each other but did not presume that one was responsible for the other’s happiness. We asked nothing of each other but loyalty, which we did not define intentionally. Yet, we gave so much to each other:
A hallowed place in this profane world.
As a couple, we thought only of today. We made plans for the future, but separate ones for each of us. We had come to Williams as individuals; we did not consider how we would leave it. What mattered most then were our careers – choosing them and paying our dues. We gave each other the gift of flight.
You were applying for jobs in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. for the following month after your graduation. I had won a fellowship that would take me to the American University in Cairo my junior year in September. I never considered not going; I never considered not going alone. You never dreamed of asking me to stay; you never thought to ask to go with me.
We scorned compromise, assuming that it would detract from our lives.
Both romantics, we thought our grande amor precarious because it was too big to squeeze into the narrow maze of everyday living. We rarely spoke our fears to each other.
“Hello,” you said, while running your hands over my short curly Afro.
“Hello,” I answered coyly.
“Are you hungry? Would you like to get something to eat at the Snack Bar? Or do you have much more work to do?”
“I should finish this reading,” I said, motioning with one hand to the paperback beside us. “I don’t have many pages left. But Kierkegaard can be dense; he can be difficult. He writes about faith using Abraham as an example. Abraham was willing to kill his son, Isaac, without hesitation, because God had commanded it as a sacrifice.
“Can you imagine that? It’s hard enough for me to imagine having a child,” I offered, my insides quivering as I said it before rushing past this dangerous juncture. “Kierkegaard says the poet-philosopher, like himself, does not have this faith. Instead, he has resignation in which he finds solace. The poet-philosopher can only celebrate from a distance Abraham’s faith in God. The poet can do nothing the hero does; he can only admire him.
“Do you think that a poet should distance him- or herself from people and relationships,” you asked. I appreciated the inclusion of women in your question. Often, you were keener than me at catching and correcting subtle sexism in language. I did not hear you asking about us. Were you?
“I’m not sure,” I said, as I began to lose myself in the gentle flow of the river.
“Kierkegaard did write in his journal that if he had had faith, he would have stayed with his fiancée,” I added absentmindedly.
How could I have spoken those words and not thought of us? Because I was so alienated from the institution of wedlock that I never thought of us as candidates for its ties. Any word tainted by its connection with nuptial vows, I did not associate with us.
I shifted my body in your arms as I picked up my book.
“I think I’ll skip the snack and keep reading. Did you bring something to read?”
“Yes. An analysis of the Civil War,” you said, as you pulled out a wedge of folded mimeographed blue-inked pages from your green Army jacket lying beside you, “Which some would argue was also about faith. I disagree. The reasons for the war were economic; they were practical, not philosophical.
“In my other history class this morning, we discussed Watergate. It’s looking more likely that Nixon will be impeached. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Nixon’s scum. But because he is president of the United States, the honor of the country also is at stake. He has to go, but I’m not quite sure how it will happen. Maybe he’ll be allowed to finish out his term. Anyway, I’d rather read about faith in God than speculate on the fate of a politician.”
“All right. I get your point,” you said, smiling. “Let’s get back to work.”
Serenaded by the song of the river, we fell into a reverie of study. I forgot my troubles as I traveled down each page. It was my time for schoolwork, not my lover. I was trying to live my life in compartments, each isolated from the other.
Still, my retreat was immeasurable. I roped in the calm again.
Eventually, I pulled my sweater tightly around me. The sun had grown weak.
“Want to go,” you asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “It’s getting cool. Don’t want to overdo it on this first day of good weather.”
“Let’s go home,” you said.
I shivered with happiness. It had not been too long that we had begun to take the liberty of calling our rooms our home. It was a big step for us. Putting names to what we were was a frightening undertaking. It made us real.
We stood, kissed and, under the disappearing rays of the sun, we walked briskly a few miles back to campus, our arms locked around each other’s waist. When we reached the top of Mission Hill leading to the new sprawling dormitory of concrete and glass, the hunger of my stomach rumbled among the stand of towering trees on either side of the tarred walk, making us laugh as we moved past them and through the split meadow.
“I didn’t realize how hungry I was,” I said.
“I hear that,” you said. “Let’s eat dinner now. It’s six o’clock. They’re serving now.”
“All right.”
We walked up the steps leading to the dormitory and once inside, down one flight toward the high-ceilinged dining room which we could see was already half-full. We dropped our books and coats on the wide ledge at the landing smothered with many others. Then we followed the thick smell of oil sizzling french fries down another flight.
After a dinner of Swiss steak and baked potato, we separated from each other. You left for the Black Student Union to conduct a committee meeting for appraising life at Mission Park. Most of the school’s sprinkling of Afro-American students, ourselves included, had chosen to live in the complex to gain more representation on the College Council and as a show of solidarity to the rest of the school and to ourselves.
What civil rights workers fought as segregation at the time of my birth in the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, we championed as black separatism. It was our choice, we said. Williams, like many traditionally white colleges, had begun to admit a group of Afro-Americans one or two years before. The numbers were so small that I often felt like part of an experiment, a specimen being scrutinized under a microscope. The scientific question was: What was it like to be black at Williams and in Amerika?
I hated and was hurt when I sensed – sometimes correctly, sometimes not – that my color defined me to others. Mission Park had become a place where I did not carry the burden of either invisibility or of acting as a spokeswoman for my race. At Mission Park, I was seen for who I was: a person. Yet, for whites, the existence of separated black housing further entrenched the belief that we, who were of different classes, regions, parties and religions, were the same. For everyone, it solidified the camps of “us” and “them”.
I wanted to go to the meeting with you. I wanted to lose myself in the group bounded by the struggle against racism, which branded all Americans. I was groping for a way to belong at Williams. Other than the painful collective memory of the Middle Passage shared with a minority of students and one professor, there was no glue holding me there. My Religion major was a saving grace but, otherwise, that intellectual paradise seemed a desert to me. It glorified the analytical and snubbed the emotional. I worked from the other direction, from the heart up. But rather than seeing my sensitivity for my strength, I felt at odds with myself. I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I never could be other than who I was but, in the hope of gaining acceptance from others, I presented to the world a hardened glaze of myself. I grew adept at rationing out myself by withholding my most revealing thoughts should they raise eyebrows. With you in my life, I could survive because I did not censor myself to you, and you listened to me and respected me.
I could not go to the BSU with you because I had procrastinated beginning a short story for my creative writing seminar. I had been afraid of digging deep within myself; I had wanted to wait until my life was safe. Life is never that. Truly, I was being tossed about in the worst storm and the most momentous story of my young life. That evening, I shirked the obvious and searched for a thesis or theme in my mind instead of a character or person in my heart. I treated the assignment like artistic work to which I could attend after I was done with my rational pursuits as though they were separate. I did not realize that an artist is at work all the time. I did not know that my mind and my heart and soul were not isolated from each other and that my writing expressed all of me. Caught between two currents, I was left spinning in place with nothing to show on paper and only tangled thoughts and feelings in my head about my dilemma. I bit the nails on my right hand so rabidly that my index finger got shorn to the quick, blood collecting at the top. My finger throbbed without my even touching it. You came home in time to spare my other fingers by kissing me over and over again.
When the light of the full moon poured into your picture window that night, it found us embraced, snaring the calm of the afternoon by the water, by the river.
Near enough to be warmed by your breath, I stole away from you in my jittery dreams of anxiety.
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