“She told you that? She told me her mother was a laundress and her father worked in a tractor factory.”

“Really? Well, she was one of the leading militants on campus. I guess it embarrassed her. All us grassroots girls. I found out one day when I came in to give her one of those financial aid packets and found out she wasn’t even on financial aid; her parents had forked out the whole bundle, girl! Well, you know, in those days we were all trying to out-poor each other—not like the kids do now—out-poor and out-Black each other, like we thought our parents’ generation were trying to . . .”

“ . . . out-white each other! Girl!”

“She was a strange girl, though, all that rage and energy when she exhorted us at those rallies—then sometimes I’d visit her in her room when she was sketching and she was this really soft-spoken girl—child-woman—and you’d hardly know she was the same person . . . I mean that just doesn’t look like her to me . . . Maybe that’s her over there?”

“No, girl, I know who that is! I just came back from that reading she had over at Wayne State. Some writer woman. Shirley wanted me to go with her. I hadn’t heard of her myself. But. Girl, I turned red, and you know it take a lot for me to turn red. And then she read some travel article she was working on. Well, if you ask me, neither of the stuff need to be read in public.”

“Well, what do you expect from those New Yorkers?”

“She’s not from New York; she’s from this little dingy town in Ohio or Lord knows where. Lord, you should have heard her brag about it too. Lord, I almost had a fit.”

“One of those out-of-the-way places?”

“Out of the way and clear around the corner!”

“I know what you mean.”

“And bragging about it, honey. I almost had a fit right there. Shirley kept nudging me. She knew who she was, but I didn’t know her from Eve, and after hearing that stuff, don’t want to know neither. I never heard so much bitch this and bitch that and pussy whatnot, girl. I’m not kidding. Am I talking too loud? I mean, I don’t talk that dirty when I’m sleeping. I wouldn’t even tell my diary that stuff that she addresses to the general public . . . That ain’t no colored child of mine, as they used to say.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Shirley kept nudging me.”

“What do you know about Ernest? Now that’s a doll. If there ever was a man in the world with the right name! Shuger! Genuine sugar!”

“Genuine brown sugar!”

“Say it again, girl. I hear you. Anyway, how did he meet that woman? I know he rues that day.”

“I don’t know how they met. But his father is some farmer from Minnesota, sent him off to U of M med school to become a doctor—he dropped out and started writing about medicine instead of practicing it, though from what I hear he know enough to be a doctor if he wanted to be one. You just don’t know about some folks . . .”