The Wide Circumference of Love Read online

  “Then he stole what little money they had in the house, the radio, and the television. Ella and Samuel reported it to the police, but they never found the man.” Her aunt’s voice, crisp, bloodless, charged on. Diane would do anything to make it stop.

  “They were never the same. Neither of them. Your father started drinking, wouldn’t come home at night. Ella came home from work one day and found a note from Samuel saying that man had taken everything. He had to leave. He couldn’t stay.”

  Diane had always known there was more than the unadorned explanations her mother had offered, but this history, so intimate and so monumental, made her wish that she was mute so no words would be expected. All her young life, she had felt branded and did not know why. How had her aunt hoarded this story all these years? How had she said it aloud now?

  “I was there the day she tore up every picture she had of Samuel and swore that she would never forgive him.”

  “Did you know about all those other men?”

  “Yes, I did. I think she was looking for your daddy in them.”

  “And my father, he just left us?” Diane asked, her voice stiff and incredulous. She had lived through the loss but until this moment had not known its depth.

  “Yes. He did.”

  “What about his family?”

  “I’ve run into them sometimes and they don’t seem to know much about Samuel anymore. I know he had a sister who just after a while got tired of Ella telling her she couldn’t see you and Ronald.”

  “So she kept us from knowing about my father and the rest of my family?”

  “Diane, she was hurt.”

  “If she was raped, why did she act like a whore?”

  “That’s the wrong question. How did she get up every morning and give another new day a try? I was her sister, and I could never figure that out.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me what happened to her? Why he left?”

  “You were thirteen when she died. Maybe she was waiting till you got older. Maybe she didn’t want to risk losing you, too, by asking you to carry what she could hardly bear.”

  Her mother had been mangled and nearly destroyed by one man. Forgotten by another. Still, Diane could not quell the yearning for her father even as the lingering promise of even more discontent was embedded in it. Now she knew why her father had left. He was weak. He had let them all down. He had fled from her wounded mother and what had remained, Diane was now certain, of her mother’s love.

  Diane was an A student whose English teacher had given her paperback copies of The Street by Ann Petry and Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, stories that they did not read in class. Miss Daughtridge, a silver-haired, long-legged, white woman who walked the aisles of class like a field marshal, asked Diane one day after class, “Tell me, what will you do with your gift for words?”

  The question, like all the questions Miss Daughtridge asked, assumed that she was instantly due a reasoned and deeply considered answer. Clutching her books as she stood before Miss Daughtridge’s desk, Diane had stammered, “I don’t know. I can do lots of things.”

  Miss Daughtridge handed her the two books. “I think you can handle these.”

  The books filled her hunger not only for story but for a replica of everything that, at seventeen, she knew life could be.

  She soon realized, however, that she did not want to use words like Ann Petry or James Baldwin, to tell stories that she knew were half lie and somehow all truth. She wanted to make words achieve what they never had for her mother or her father—to make things right. The joyriding teens who’d hit Ella with a stolen car had served three years in a juvenile facility, a punishment that embittered everyone Ella had left behind. Diane’s favorite TV show was Perry Mason, and although she had never once seen him defend a person who looked like her, she loved his stoic yet unquenchable commitment to finding the truth, to law and order.

  After high school, she ran, but never fast enough, from her mother’s life and her mother’s death. From her father’s disappearance and his weak-kneed cowardly love. At Spelman College in Atlanta, Diane learned from her professors that she was there not just to get a degree but to figure out how to crack open a resistant world for her people. She imitated the confident demeanor and style of the black girls of privilege who were her classmates, yet snuck off campus to serve free breakfasts provided by the Black Panthers to children in the projects of Atlanta.

  Then, in the middle of the fall semester of her senior year, Aunt Georgia called and told her Ronald had been killed in Vietnam. She’d come home from Spelman tight-lipped and controlled. At Arlington cemetery she sat beside Aunt Georgia watching her nervously pat the folded American flag that lay inert—and to Diane, obscene—on her lap. During the repast following her brother’s burial she accepted everyone’s condolences and the hugs of Ronald’s friends—one or two headed to college and several to Vietnam themselves—and then walked upstairs to her room and wrecked it, tossing sheets, blankets, clothing onto the floor, ripping up the paperback books, the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and yanking the posters of Gil Scott Heron and Angela Davis off the walls. If she’d had a match to strike, she would have immolated what was now debris, as well as herself.

  Diane graduated salutatorian from Spelman and then she ran to New York University School of Law. The law, she was sure, would make her someone with more answers than questions. On her best days, she walked through the world remembering that her mother had told her to take care of somebody, pleased that she had chosen a profession dedicated to doing just that.

  Yet the nightmare raging within her whispered, Men leave, men rape, men die. When Diane watched her lovers leave, she watched them go as Ella’s child. Ella, who had shattered at night and gathered up her remains in the morning because she’d had bodies and souls to heal.

  Diane returned to Washington from New York to work as a legal aid lawyer in D.C.’s public defender service, unique in the country for hiring graduates of the nation’s top law schools to represent indigent clients. The courts were clogged with so many young black men on trial for everything from mayhem to murder that the black court-appointed lawyers began calling the pool “the chain gang.”

  She was by then a woman who saw her mother’s face in hers, all the time and everywhere, for she had the same smooth, seamless dark skin, the same look of doubt that made some think that she could never be satisfied. But the look of calm certitude that gave her eyes a probing, meditative glow—that was her own. Those eyes made her clients feel that she was on their side and assured her friends that she could be trusted with their secrets.

  She sat face-to-face with her mostly young clients and listened to their stories of innocence, guilt, wrong place, and wrong time. Sometimes they had murdered, but Diane often learned that they had killed because someone was out to kill them or they’d taken a life to prove a decadent sense of manhood seeded in the very soil of their lives. They had stolen but also had nothing to lose. They sold drugs not just for greed, but for respect. Of the scores of those she was assigned to defend, only a few, she concluded, were sociopaths, criminals with no hope of salvation or redemption. Most of their stories circled back to barren and bleak childhoods that ensured they would end up just where they were, staring at a lawyer, considering a plea deal and wondering which of their friends they would be reunited with in jail. Until they sat across from Diane for the first time in the basement of the superior court, many had never ventured out of their decaying and forgotten neighborhoods—Anacostia, Barry Farms, Ivy City, Sursum Corda, Trinidad—never seen the White House or the Capitol, and couldn’t imagine either of those buildings having anything to do with their lives. More than once, she had wondered if, sitting across from her at the nicked conference table, was the son of the man who had destroyed her parents’ lives. She wondered if she would extend to her mother’s rapist the compassion she found herself bestowing upon her clients. She was haunted by the knowledge that defending her clients was
so much more than legal procedures and bargaining with prosecutors. The essential meaning of life, of crime and punishment, for her clients, for the society that had made them, were the questions and obsessions often obscured by the grind of never-ending cases. Only rarely did she have time to breathe in the renewing essence of those inquiries.

  Increasingly burdened by a sense of futility as she plea bargained more cases than she tried or got a client off on one offense only to have him show up in handcuffs again months later, Diane began to think of changing to family law. Surely there she could make a difference, defend these young men as juveniles, steer them into rehabilitation services and treatment for the learning disabilities, post-traumatic stress, and emotional abuse that was the ticking time-bomb pulse of their criminal acts. If she couldn’t do that, then the choice of law made no sense.

  Chapter Six

  1978

  The night Diane met Gregory, he was an architect at a party full of lawyers, wore a dashiki—though, by then, even the Reverend Jesse Jackson had begun shopping at Brooks Brothers—and he interrupted a boring conversation Diane was having with a justice department lawyer. He dismissed the lawyer just by thrusting his hand at Diane, standing his ground, and saying, “Hi, I’m Gregory Tate.”

  “That was rude,” Diane scolded him, astonished, as the lawyer quickly and quietly skulked away.

  “Not really. I call it survival of the fittest.”

  “You’re wearing a dashiki and throwing around an out-of-context Darwinian quote that’s been used to justify racism, colonialism, and war. Is this nerves or balls?”

  “Both.” Gregory smiled, too confidently for her comfort.

  She was a tall woman, exactly six feet, used to entering a room and allowing everyone to catch their breath, evaluate her, get comfortable with her height and what they imagined it might portend. Gregory was a few inches taller, though she was not sure why that mattered. His light skin, those gray eyes with a flicker of blue, the keen features and straight hair texture made Diane wonder if Gregory was one of those racial dinosaurs, more proud of and interested in the white ancestor who had bequeathed him that hair, those features, than of the scores of blacks whose blood flowed more generously in his veins. She knew him—or thought she did—could look at him and know what kind of neighborhood he had grown up in, what his parents looked like, what his values were. She had him down pat. Diane heard and felt the creak of a familiar curtain lower between them. She was on one side and he was on the other. Gregory Tate, she suspected, was the product of a world where skin tone and class were sometimes interchangeable bloodlines.

  On her side of the curtain, Diane remembered Jeff Darlington, a boy from that world who she had met at fifteen in the D.C. Youth Chorale. They’d stood at the bus stop after the rehearsals and talked about folk singers like Odetta and Bob Dylan and the colleges they wanted to attend. He’d call Diane in the hour or so after she had finished her homework and before she had to go to bed and they’d talk in whispers and hushed laughter about the cliques at their schools which they hated, not because they had never been invited to join but because they knew there was so much more to the world and to them. Diane waited for Jeff to ask her out to a movie. She dreamed about going to see Dr. Zhivago with him. And then, one night after they had talked about his membership in the chess club and an article she’d written for the school paper, he’d said apologetically, “I like you a lot, but you’re too dark. I couldn’t have you as a girlfriend.”

  Those words changed everything Diane had felt for Jeff. He had defined her with a lethal casualness that was a stake she felt pulsing inside her flesh even now. In the weeks that followed, her growing coldness toward Jeff baffled and angered him. His indifference to the impact of those words for Diane drew blood. Was he joking? Was he stating what was in his world a fact? How could she possibly call him a friend? Fantasize about holding his hand? In the world she was now a part of, Diane often looked around the restaurants and boardrooms for Jeff, having practiced in her imagination striding over to him and asking coldly, “Am I still too dark?”

  But the fact that Gregory had approached her, a six-foot-tall, dark-skinned woman still flouting a big afro when all her girlfriends had cut theirs down to a “sensible” height or begun once again perming their hair, made this man suddenly interesting, although she was certain she was not his type—and he wasn’t hers.

  Gregory formally introduced himself, asked Diane her name, and told her that he was a cousin of the guest of honor who had just graduated from Howard’s law school. The party was held in one of the rambling Victorian houses surrounding the Howard campus, houses full of “character” that rarely hid the disrepair. It was August and the tiny sweltering living room where she and Gregory stood was packed. The tie-dyed covered sofa for six held at least nine and the steps leading upstairs were home to bodies prone and hunched over in intense, seemingly conspiratorial conversations. The drinks of choice were sangria and malt liquor. The drug passed from hand to hand was marijuana.

  “So now that we’ve established you’ve got nerves and balls, Gregory Tate, please tell me there’s more to you than that.”

  His laughter broke open his face, washed over her, and was so loud and joyous those around them turned to look. Gregory reached for her hand, leading Diane into the den where in the blue-light tinged room, couples were slow dancing to Heatwave’s “Always and Forever.”

  “Actually …” she began, looking him dead-on as he positioned his palm on her lower back and moved in close.

  “Shh,” he whispered, gently pushing her head onto his shoulder against the musky, warm material of his dashiki. Diane relaxed and found that she was made for his arms to hold her like this, the instinctive movements of their thighs, pelvis, and arms entwined, and the gentle drag of their footsteps across the floor, lulling and delightful. When the song ended, she released Gregory, bothered and charged, a quiver of mindless laughter whirling in her throat. After dancing, they moved to the front porch among a procession of partygoers leaving and arriving, other couples leaning on the banister, huddled on blankets on the grassy lawn. They sat in a corner, sipping sangria, surrounded by others but both feeling entirely and happily apart.

  He was the son of a “Gold Coast” family, one of the black families that lived along Washington’s Sixteenth Street, home to the president of Howard University, black members of the president’s cabinet, and the city’s black upper crust. Gregory had not used the term “Gold Coast,” but in the southeast neighborhood of her childhood, Congress Heights, and even in Petworth where Diane had lived with Aunt Georgia, Sixteenth Street was often referred to as though it were an Alpine principality, a mythical land whose black population breathed a rarified air.

  Diane grilled Gregory until he told her that his father was not just a doctor but the head of surgery at Howard University Hospital, once called Freedman’s Hospital, where Ella had been a nurse. And he told her he was an architect. His mother, Margaret, taught social work at Howard University.

  “I won’t stereotype you if you don’t stereotype me,” Gregory said after they had traded personal histories, his with references to summers on Martha’s Vineyard and graduation from Wilson High School, hers with stories of growing up in southeast and Petworth.

  “All that, and you don’t want me to stereotype you?”

  “Actually, no, I don’t. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she told him, the statement quelling the reprise of an unruly desire. “Why architecture?”

  “I loved math and art and that’s what architecture is. I looked at empty lots and wondered how the space could be filled.” Gregory leaned back in the plastic folding chair, his gray eyes aflame with remembrance and satisfaction. “One of the most thrilling moments of my life was a midnight tour of the ruins in Rome a couple of years ago. My dream trip? Egypt. Now that was architecture.” He sighed, like an unabashed lover.

  “Do you know,” he continued, “there’s not a single building downtow
n, in the city’s power center, designed by a black architect? I’m going to change that. My heroes are men whose names too few people know: Paul Williams, John Brent, and Louis Bellinger, early black architects whose lives and work I’ve studied.”

  Gregory’s ambition and confidence was bracing and seductive and Diane felt the need to match his gift for revelation with more of her story. He went into the house to refresh their drinks and when he came back to the porch she took her cup and haltingly began, “My parents divorced when I was young. Then my mother died. My brother and I went to live with my aunt.” The lie came easily. She had told it so often a part of her believed it was true. Couldn’t you consider it a kind of divorce, what her father had done? Rarely could she admit how much it mattered what people thought of her. Of her background. Of her family. Of her beginnings. Law, with its specialized jargon of offense, defense, boundaries, and arguments, had schooled her in the art of creating and controlling her narrative. The truth promised conflagration if she ever spoke its name.

  “I’m sorry, but I know you’re more than what you lost. Tell me more. Now I’ll ask you, why the law?”

  “It seemed to promise a way to set some things right. For me injustice isn’t theoretical.

  I went to law school and worked a year or two as a public defender, and now I’m with a firm specializing in family law.”

  “Will you promise to tell me one day why injustice isn’t theoretical for you?”

  “I’m black. I’m a woman.”

  “But there’s a deeper reason, and I hope one day I earn the right to hear what it is.”

  Gregory drove her home from the party and on the way they stopped at Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street and ordered hot dogs laden with a soupy stew of cheese and a mountain of fries. They sat in a booth in the crowded diner and gorged on the food and each other. Gregory pointed across the street and told her that he had an office in that building, which his family owned, though the rest of U Street was ghostly and treacherous, still scarred from the riots sparked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination a decade earlier. The streets had been dug up and in daylight resembled the aftermath of a bombing, all as part of the work on the city’s first-ever subway system.