She kept me around. To talk to. To demonstrate her willingness to associate with those of less sophistication and worldliness. She wanted to hear every detail of my growing up, how my family lived, what we ate. I would follow her to her meetings, to her rallies, to her events. Almost a lapdog. She was sleeping with other men—sometimes I was convinced with a multitude. Yet I went for months before even attempting to kiss her. I had stopped sleeping around, and returned to an almost chaste soul, my worship now being this mysterious force named Anne Gazelle Dubois.

One autumn day, one of the few days in which there were no meetings for her to rush to, she turned to me as we stood beneath a huge cottonwood tree on campus and asked, “Why haven’t you tried to screw me?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or just stare. She had light brown eyes and sometimes she focused them with such unbridled sincerity that they belied her canniness. I kissed her long and hard.

“So you aren’t a faggot?”

I chuckled.

“Good.”

The first time she took me into her bed I was impotent. “Are you sure you’re not a faggot?” she asked. We laughed at the entire situation and went out for Chinese food. I never had that problem with her again.

But she never truly gave herself to me, never opened. Especially not then. The people—the people were her mission, her conviction, her life. This was her ambition, her raison d’être. When I confessed jealousy she accused me of weakness, of being out of step with the movement, of losing perspective of the way of hope for “the people.”

“That’s bullshit, Anne. I love you.”

“‘Love’? Come on, preacherman. Don’t you see? Your idea of ‘love’ is a foolish Western concept the white man has created to enslave—who? Me. Woman. No, sir, Mr. Man, I’m my own woman.”

“Anne, I love you.”

“Yeah, I love you too, little boy.”

“I love you.”

“You’ve got my body, Goddamn it. You have my friendship. Leave my fucking soul alone!”

Was it beauty? I often ask myself: Was it the fact that she was so light and I had become enamored of the situation—as Franklin says, some psychological impediment? Did I want to sleep with a white woman, and found in her a way to have both without paying the price? I stopped seeing her. I stopped seeing anyone. My relatively short life as a Casanova was over. I took my heartbreak to be God’s way of calling me back to the roost.