Chapter 16
Jay left early the next morning. In bed, I watched him bounce on my phone from Union Station to BWI.
My picture for him was an old one from college: him at his freshman dorm desk delicately holding a turkey sub, looking surprised.
There was a pocket Constitution he kept on his desk.
I never understood it, that old, problematic document, the one that excluded us, why he liked it so much.
It was one of the things that endeared him to me, his naked, naive belief in everything.
Eventually his location failed to load and his picture disappeared.
Tidying up the Airbnb, I found his half-eaten granola bar on the nightstand behind the lamp.
I didn’t want to throw it away, so I stuffed it in my bag, then I crumpled over in tears.
It was always the small things he left behind that made me feel his absence, its unbearable weight, crushing the breath out of me.
When I got home, my mom was talking on the phone in a low voice. I figured she was talking to Aunt Lisa and poked my head into the living room. My mom was bending her toes, which looked tiny and girlish in pink slippers, on the ottoman. I waved. She smiled, distracted.
I found an interview with Janine from the seventies on YouTube. She’s in her mid-twenties, her black feathery hair rippling away from her face.
“Many critics didn’t know what to make of your first novel,” the interviewer says, legs crossed in his armchair. “It was controversial to say the least. What was it you were trying to say?”
“I wanted to write about love and being young, but also rebellion.” Janine aggressively smokes a cigarette in luxuriant bell sleeves. “I guess I was writing against respectability. Bonnie—”
“At one point she argues with her professor that racial uplift is a sham.”
“She does.”
“Why is it a sham?”
“Maybe ‘sham’ isn’t right, but it’s certainly a trap.
You can’t moralize your way out of a racist system by, say, getting married, being a good Christian, adopting white nuclear family practices.
But Black people have and continue to believe this.
That if they just do this or that, equality will be attained.
Though it’s never about what you do or don’t do.
You don’t attain equality, it’s yours already, it’s the claiming of what’s already yours that’s the struggle.
Bonnie understands this, so she does what she wants. ”
“The novel didn’t do well.”
Janine laughs. “Define ‘well.’ ”
“Your publisher dropped you, and as far as I know, your second book hasn’t found another publisher.”
“That’s because I don’t keep my mouth shut.”
“Howard wasn’t thrilled about your novel taking place on their campus.”
“They proved my point about respectability.”
The interviewer says, “Not many people liked Bonnie. That was maybe the biggest critique of the novel, her character.”
Janine laughs a throaty laugh. I could almost see her anger in the wet pink of her gums. “You think Bonnie cares?”
“I doubt it.”
“You rarely see Black women like Bonnie in literature. But we exist. We’re all over.”
“You’re a teacher now. What do you tell your students?”
Janine pauses to smoke. “Every writer has that project they don’t have the words to write but that they must write in order to find the words. That’s why you have to write it, to learn what it is. You set it on the page, you set it free. You set yourself and others free too.”
“Ms. Janine Ford, thank you for your time.”
“Thank you, Robert.”
When the interview went dark, I rushed online to buy her debut novel. It was out of print. I couldn’t even find it secondhand. The shimmering-pink hope I’d had adopted a gray cast, like ruined footage that couldn’t be restored. It was like she’d never sat down to write the book at all.