“The only solution?” My voice raises several octaves. Sitting across from Porter now, my mind returns to the weekend holed up in my and Quinn’s room in Little Hall after my abortion decades ago. The flash of memory is jarring but also imbues me with the understanding of feeling backed into a corner. Porter’s myopia mirrors my own, and a crack of forgiveness rears its soothing head. For him and for myself. “The only solution to what?”
“Callie, you remember when I had appendicitis and I asked the doctor to have Charles call my mom?”
“Oh, I remember. Looking back, that should have been one of many signs I missed that I was way more committed to our relationship than you were.” I’m ready to go toe-to-toe with Porter that there is not one aspect of our time together that he remembers that I do not. I have worked through the memories of our college years over and over. Every second of them.
“I knew Charles would be able to talk to my parents best—my mom, really—and that she would be able to hear the news from him more easily than from you.”
“Why? That’s ridiculous,” I insist. “As scary as it was, I was in full control of that entire surgery situation, Porter, and you are giving me zero credit.”
“You’re mistaking my words, Callie. When we met, I loved how idealistic you were. Shiny and unsoiled by the world as you bounced between classes, your only worries were finishing our reading, meeting your deadlines at the newspaper, and choosing what to wear to parties.” Porter begins his summation of who he thought I was at Princeton.
“I’m a born-and-raised New Yorker, Porter. Don’t tell me I was silly and naive,” I protest, standing up for my street smarts squarely earned in ’80s New York.
“I didn’t say silly and naive. But your view on the world was so positive and full of possibility, like you had all the freedom in the world to make the decisions you wanted for yourself. I was raised differentlythan that. I learned early from my parents I could do anything, but I couldn’t do everything. There’s a distinct difference,” Porter says ruefully.
“Fine, okay, but what does that have to do with Charles being the one who needed to call your mom from the hospital?” I question, confused.
Porter’s eyebrows knit together as if he’s grasping for something in his brain that he can’t quite reach. He huffs a breath from his nose and wipes the corners of his mouth meticulously with his napkin.
“One of my fondest childhood memories is my dad teaching me how to drive. He let me race around our property in his old pickup, his head out the passenger-side window, hollering and celebrating like he was a teenager himself. I couldn’t wait to get my license and leave the farm to meet up with my friends on the football team. I was sixteen, and I wanted what I thought was the ultimate freedom.” Porter smiles wryly. His face has relaxed as he settles into his story.
Until he turns serious once more.
“Even though I was ready, the week before I got my license, my mom insisted my dad take me out on several more drives. We parked the truck where we could see the traffic on the closest busy county route, and my dad explained to me what he and my mom called ‘the real rules of the road.’” Porter stares at me intently, seeming to will me to understand something I don’t, since having grown up in the city, I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was nearly thirty.
“My dad said, ‘Son, your mother wants you to understand that this here country of ours might be fair on paper, but it sure ain’t square on the street.’ He spent each afternoon that week pointing out cars that would likely be pulled over by cops: fast-looking sports cars, old derelicts with dents and duct tape on their taillights. And any driven by Black males. Young ones like me and old ones like him. It put a cloud over my plans to meet up with my buddies, but I understood. This lesson was just one part of a bigger one my mother had religiously impressed upon me my whole life,” Porter explains. “Though my dad was the head of our family, that was in name only; my mom ruled us kids. And for Delsie Beaumont, back then her number one lesson inlife was to teach us how to get along in White spaces but not entangle ourselves with White people. Do you get what I mean?”
I nod at Porter, not in full understanding, but so he knows I’m listening to his every word and he can take all the time he wants to share this part of his youth I was never privy to.
“Callie,” Porter continues, “even if I had all the talent and perseverance in the world, there was no doubt in my parents’ minds, and mine, that I was hamstrung by my looks.”
“And all those years in college I mistook you for humble, Porter. Must have been rough being handsome and ripped. Pretty privilege counts for men too, you know.” I set Porter straight.
“You think I’m handsome, huh?” Porter smirks. “And ripped too?”
“I said youwerehandsome and ripped,” I clarify. Men and their egos—so juvenile. But Porter’s response makes me blush, and I look to my lap to try and hide it.
“My folks knew I could do anything, but in their experience, the restrictions on our lives came from White people,” Porter reveals heavily. “My mother was fine with me going up North for college, but she did not want me bringing a White woman back home. In my mother’s judgment, that would’ve led to trouble.”
This is a revelation I didn’t really consider when we were together. I was infatuated with Porter and cared nothing of what people thought of our pairing. If people didn’t like it, I assumed they were just jealous that I was with Princeton’s star wide receiver. It never crossed my mind that Porter was on constant high alert for what others thought of us as a couple, most expressly, his mother.
“I get that your family might have had problems with other White people, but you didn’t give me a chance to convince them otherwise about me. I mean, they had to at least have had a White neighbor, if not some White friends. They had to know before you applied that Princeton was almost all White in the nineties.”
“Yeah, my dad did have a few White friends, but my mom ... she came from the coastal Gullah culture, and as a group, they have traditionally beensuspect of White people. Whenever our neighbors or my dad’s handful of White buddies were around, my mom turned secretive, reticent. Neither of my parents shared details about our home life outside of family, and my mother schooled me that some folks were not to be trusted. Family business was just that, private. It’s not an excuse, but it is part of why I struggled to share with you about home.”
I’ve heard more tonight about Porter’s emotional foundation than during all the years we dated in college. This makes me sad for what he carried by himself at Princeton, none of it shared with me or, based on what he just said, with anyone.
“Did Charles know this? Details about your family, I mean. The directions you were pulled in by being with me.”
“Yeah, we talked about it. Well, we talked about it as much as two dudes in college know how to talk about complicated things like that. Me and Charles used to say that the four of us looked like the brochures that colleges recruit with, when the truth was, the handful of kids of color at Princeton stuck together.”
“I never noticed that.”
“There was no reason you would, but it was clear as day to me and Charles.”
“Did Charles feel as conflicted as you did on campus?”
“Yeah, but maybe not as much, because even though he was Black, he had more practice than I did in privileged spaces. He’d already proven he could hang with the crowd at Dalton. I don’t think he felt the same urgency to prove that he belonged at Princeton the way I did. Still, Charles got me more than most people at college. And hereallygot me, meaning he had my back, when it came to decisions I had to make to hurt you and my family as little as possible.”
