The Color of Water by James McBride

Author:James McBride [McBride, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781440636103
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2006-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

15.

Graduation

After my abortion I wrote to Tateh and said I didn’t want to come back to Suffolk. I enrolled in Girls Commercial High School on Bergen Street in 1936. It was just down the street from Bubeh’s, but the schoolwork was hard and I struggled my entire junior year, sleeping on Bubeh’s couch and wrestling with algebra every night. Girls High was way ahead of Suffolk High and I never would’ve graduated on time, so after the school year ended I returned to Virginia to finish high school. When I came back to Suffolk, the first thing I said to Peter was, “We can’t see each other anymore. Don’t come by.”

He said, “I’ve been waiting for you. I still love you,” and I was swayed, because I still felt a deep love for him.

Not long after that, I was in the store behind the counter and two young black women came in. I overheard them talking about Peter, and one of them says, “Oh yeah, he’s getting married soon …” I almost fell over. Tateh was standing right next to me, so I grabbed a rag and started wiping the counter, edging close to them, eavesdropping. I was practically falling over the counter trying to hear them. “Oh yeah,” says the other. “He got such and such pregnant…” She named a black girl who lived behind us in the neighborhood.

I went right out and found him. The heck with who knew about us then. I was so mad I marched right down the road to his house in daylight and got him out. “Tell me the truth,” I said. He confessed it. “They’re making me marry her,” he said. “My folks are making me.”

“Did you get her pregnant?”

“Yeah.”

Oh, that messed me up. I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore and walked back through the black neighborhood, into the store, and went upstairs and cried my heart out, because I still loved him. I went through this entire ordeal and here he was getting busy with somebody else. The fact that he was black and the girl he was marrying was black—well, that hurt me even more. If the world were fair, I suppose I would have married him, but there was no way that could happen in Virginia. Not in 1937.

I made up my mind then that I was going to leave Suffolk for good. I was seventeen, in my last year of high school, and for the first time in my life I was starting to have opinions of my own. There was no life for me there. I was planning to leave for New York. But see, I had Mameh. I was her eyes and ears in America. She couldn’t speak English and I translated for her and looked out for her, because Tateh didn’t care for her at all. Her stomach was starting to bother her and she was starting to have these fainting spells, you know, she’d just black out in the middle of the day.

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