In the arts and the humanities, on the other hand, I said, you could actually come by all of the fundamentals by the time you could function on a senior level of an accredited high school. Because by then you would have been initiated into the realm of the great world masterpieces of literature, music, and history, and the ones you had not read as class assignments on your own initiative were part of the same universal context as the ones assigned. After all, it was not as if you had to go on beyond high school and then college and then graduate in order to read other masterworks by the same Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Balzac, or George Eliot, a sample of whose works you had already come to terms with in high school or even as a high school dropout.
Eunice, who had fulfilled all of the requirements for the M.S. degree in education at Teachers College, was looking forward to spending the next year in New York working as a part-time substitute elementary school teacher. But I knew that she felt that after that she should spend at least several terms working as a teacher, administrator, or supervisor down in central Alabama. She knew very well that the hometown benefactors who had provided the four-year college scholarship to earn her B.S. degree, without which she would not have been in position to win the fellowship for graduate study for the master’s degree at Teachers College, would not feel that she had deserted them.
She knew as well as I did that their reaction would be exactly the same as when down-home folks have always celebrated local people who succeed elsewhere, especially up north in Philamayork. Who knows? Such down-home celebration of locals who make good elsewhere may have begun all the way back in the era of the fugitive slave, of whom those still down on the plantation most often said not that he or she ran away and left us, but rather if he or she could do that, other folks down here can do it, too.
I could already hear all sorts of variations on remarks like: Y’all remember little ol’ frizzly-headed Eunice Whatshername that use to pass by here going to and from school? And went on through high school and got that big send-off to college? Well, they say when she finished up her college course she got another big send-off to New York. And when she passed some courses up there they hired her. Everybody always did say that girl was going places. I always liked the way she carried herself on the way to and from school and anywhere else. Always neat as a pin whatever she was wearing and never one to cash in on being that good-looking. You can ask anybody and they’ll tell you. Didn’t go around with her nose in the air neither. That child had her nose in them books every chance she got. I always did say she could make it anywhere doing anything she put her mind to.
She was as aware of all that as any other scholarship student I ever met. So she also knew that her hometown folks, like mine down in Gasoline Point and Mobile County Training School, wanted her to go wherever her quest for further development led her. And she also knew that their trust of her judgment was such that none of her down-home benefactors had assumed that she had given up on her own professional objectives to get married. After all, it was as if she had gotten married and gone straight off to graduate school as if on an extended honeymoon.
In any case, if I had said nothing about going back down to central Alabama because I had decided to stay at New York University for a third consecutive year as I had originally anticipated, she would not have said what she said about going back when she did since she already knew that I had begun to question the relevance of my academic research assignments to the way I was beginning to want to come to my own terms with things. When I showed her the letter with the offer from central Alabama she said, Why not? She said, Meanwhile, I have some unfinished business of my own down in those parts.
You didn’t have to explain any of that to Taft Edison, and when he said, Speaking of roommates, I’ve been making a few cautious moves in that direction myself, and there is somebody you’ll be meeting soon, I knew that he was changing the subject. And I said, Whenever you say.
I knew that he had been married for a short time during his second year in New York, and I also knew that former wife’s name and that she was a nightclub entertainer, but he never discussed their relationship except to say that it was a mistake that was soon corrected and that there were no lingering after-effects. That was all he said and I did not ask him anything else about her.
He said, Her name is Janice and we’ve been seeing each other for a few months now and have just about decided that we’ve got something going that should be continued at a closer range of involvement. So we’re looking for a place. I must say, and as you probably guessed, this was not something I was looking for
