His First Wife

“Not out of my stomach!” I playfully wrapped my arms around my stomach as he wrestled with me. We hadn’t had sex yet. I hadn’t built up the nerve and Jamison seemed determined not to rush things.

“Do you really think we’ll be together then?” I asked out of breath. “Like that far from now.”

“I can’t imagine myself with anyone else.” His voice was serious. Not one crack. He was still. Stopped and looked into my eyes. “I love you, Kerry. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me. I’ll come there every weekend if that’s what it takes to keep you.”

“You’re gonna come to class with me there too?”

“Hell, yeah!” He grinned. “I have to know what these folks are putting in my lady’s head.”

“Very funny.”

“But whether I’m going to want to be with you isn’t the question,” he started, circling the inside of my navel with his index finger. “It’s if you’ll have me.”

“If I’ll have you?” I asked.

“It’s no secret that you weren’t exactly happy about dating me in the first place.... Not after you found out my past. How I got here,” he said. “I was surprised you even called. Being funny can only get a brother so far with a woman like you.”

Jamison was at Morehouse on a full scholarship. His mother, who hadn’t gone to college, couldn’t afford to send him and his father died the year before Jamison graduated from high school. His parents made ends meet before Jamison’s father’s kidneys gave out to a lifelong bout of diabetes, but they were by all accounts poor. He was raised in one of the toughest neighborhoods in southwest Atlanta, but his grades and penchant for science led to him receiving attention from a local doctor who went to Morehouse. The man liked Jamison so much that he and a few of his colleagues agreed to pay his tuition for four years if he got into their alma mater.

“Where you came from doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “You’re here now.”

“But it does matter,” he replied.

“In some circles, yes. It’ll always matter. This is the South.”

“Yeah—home of the uppity negro . . . the Talented Tenth,” he said, sitting up. “Where I’m from will always matter here. I noticed it my sophomore year when I pledged APhi and my own line brothers shut me out of certain things—Damien included. You all segment and separate people based on things they can’t even help or change . . . and for what?”

He was quiet then, but I had nothing to say. I realized that I was part of the “you” he was speaking of.

“The worst part,” he went on, “is that I’ve lived here all my life, not five miles from Morehouse, and I didn’t even know it was going on. I mean, I knew people like you looked down on people like me when I was a kid, but I always thought it was just because I was poor or didn’t have the right clothes. I thought that would change once I got to college, put on the right shirt and pledged the right fraternity. Then I’d be one of you.”

“It’s not that serious, Jamison,” I said.

“It’s serious to your mother. It matters to her. I saw how she looked at me when she came to visit last week.” He scrunched up his face to mimic the bitter frown my mother had permanently plastered on her face when I introduced them at my apartment. She didn’t even have to talk to Jamison to know who and what he was. She saw his car in the parking lot. His sneakers. His clothing. And knew the story. She wasted no time talking to him. She just sat on the edge of my sofa as if his sitting beside her was offensive and spoke to me like he wasn’t in the room.

“My mother is a different story. That’s just where she’s from. History means everything to her,” I said. This all seemed bizarre to Jamison, but in my world it was just how things were done. Our kind just married our kind and that was how it was. It was how they protected one another. Ensured that we were all going someplace. And had the same ideas. The same past. My granduncle had ties to Atlanta Life, the country’s most wealthy African-American insurance company. My mom grew up in Cascade Heights and was a third-generation Spelman girl. There were rules that women with my mother’s past had to follow. Rules that she’d passed on to me.

“If history means everything to her,” Jamison said, “then it must mean everything to you too.” He looked at me; the look in his eyes was far from what it had been just minutes earlier.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I know you now,” I sat up beside him. “I know that you have a future. You’re going to be a doctor, Jamison. And that has to count for something. Right?”

“But what if I’m not a doctor? Then will it count for something?” he asked.

“You will be.” I kissed him on the cheek reassuringly. “I know it. And my mother will just have to be happy about it.”

After we snacked on boxed macaroni and cheese he’d made in the microwave, Jamison fell asleep, and against the backdrop of his senseless snoring I was awake and thinking about everything we’d just talked about. I’d meant everything I said to him. I believed in Jamison. Believed in who he was and who he would be. I had the name and the money. But he’d be great one day. So what if he hadn’t been in Jack and Jill and gone to the right prep school. He was going to be a doctor. We’d be okay, and I didn’t need an elite Atlanta stamp to prove it.

But still, looking at the blue macaroni and cheese box in the trash, hearing rap on the radio, and realizing that I was a senior, sneaking around in a dorm room when most upperclassmen had the money to move off campus, a little part of me, one I’d wished was a bit quieter, did want Jamison to be more like me. More like the first boyfriend I’d imagined. He had caviar and fine wine and cheese in the fridge, an apartment in Buckhead and a last name that made other girls jealous. While in my heart I knew that Jamison was better than any of the men who could give me any of those things, Jamison was nothing like that man . . . and really, nothing like me. I looked at him lying in the bed and imagined how that could be—that the man who made me laugh so hard my cheeks would ache, with whom I never ran out of things to talk to about, was from the same city but a whole world away from mine.

My thoughts about our differences didn’t exactly dissipate when I finally met Jamison’s mother. If my mother hated Jamison, then Jamison’s mother despised me. And unlike my mother, she wasn’t quiet about it.

After quizzing me for thirty minutes about why I didn’t know how to cook, she asked how I paid my bills and who paid my rent. It was obvious that she was trying to paint me out to be a spoiled little rich girl, and that wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that she did it in front of Jamison’s entire family.

To celebrate our one-month anniversary, he’d taken me to what he called Sunday dinner to meet his mother. Assuming it was anything like the Sunday dinners my mother hosted, I wore a sweet, floral print dress and carried with me a flan I’d purchased for dessert.