— What did he say to your friend?
I couldn’t hang up, because I wouldn’t get the information I wanted. If I hung up, Molloy could have the call traced. I’d be in trouble for making harassing calls to precincts, which would be extremely ironic.
— He said to her… he said, Hello, I’m the police.
— Yeah. Then what?
— And then, then he said…
I didn’t want to tell him the story, give my friend’s real name, tell him about her tickets in two states, and her car being parked illegally, and her bribing the guy in the corporate lot. But I had to give him some sense of the situation in order to get the information I needed.
— He said to her, Hi, Diana. Hi, I’m the police. Then he said, he said, Diana… Diana… have you done anything wrong lately?
There was a very long silence.
— Have you done anything wrong lately? Molloy repeated.
It was weird coming from a cop’s mouth. He gathered his thoughts, while I remained breathlessly quiet.
— A police officer wouldn’t say that, Molloy answered soberly. A police officer wouldn’t say that.
— He wouldn’t, I repeated, just as gravely.
The cop thought again, for a longer time.
— Listen, I want you to let me know if he ever calls your friend again. Because a cop shouldn’t do that… He trailed off.
— That guy’s impersonating an officer.
— Oh, yeah. I’m sure he won’t… he probably won’t call her again. But if he does, I’ll phone you immediately, I promise.
— You do that, Molloy said.
— I will. Thanks, I said.
— Yeah, he said. Maybe Molloy didn’t believe any of this, but he did the whole thing straight.
I called my friend, and we stayed on the phone for hours, laughing about how crazy I was to say “Have you done anything wrong lately?” to a cop, with all its implications, and we laughed about her racing out of her house to the corporate lot, jumping into her car and driving off in search of a legal parking space as if she were being chased by the devil.
Maybe the devil was chasing her and me. Because we laughed off and on for about a year more, and then we had less to laugh about, and then nothing to laugh about. I don’t know, we grew to distrust each other, and stopped being friends. Maybe Molloy laughed later.
Give Us Some Dirt
On long, summer nights in Pin Point, the Georgia air hung still as a corpse, and they’d wait for a breeze to save them. The heat felt like another skin on Clarence. His Mother would say, Clarence, what have you been up to? Playing by the river again? Oh Lord, we’ve got to clean you up for church, but aren’t you something to behold? And his mother would clap her palms together or spread her arms wide, like their preacher. Oh, Lord, she’d exclaim. Sometimes she’d point to sister and lovingly scold, “She doesn’t get up to trouble like you, son.” Clarence scrubbed the mud off until his knuckles nearly bled, while his sister giggled.
These days she wasn’t laughing so much.
The dirt couldn’t be washed away, not after Clarence kneeled in their white church, and they slimed him with derision. They couldn’t see who he was, how hard he’d worked, what he’d had to do, but he knew how to act. Behave yourself, boy, Daddy would say. Clarence’s grandfather, Clarence called him Daddy, was a strict, righteous man, who never complained, not even during segregation times, didn’t say a word, so Clarence wouldn’t, either. Those days were over, and they had their freedom now. He set Daddy’s bust on a shelf near his desk in his new office.
The D.C. nights mortified him, the air as suffocating as Pin Point’s. Clarence couldn’t free himself of history’s stench. On some interminable evenings, he nearly sent that woman a message, made the call, because she’d dragged him down for their delectation. He’d pick up the receiver and put it down.
The noise of the ceiling fan assaulted him like a swarm of bugs. Clarence’s jaw locked, and his strong hands balled into fists. Every pornographic day of his trial, Clarence’s wife, Virginia, sat quietly behind him. She barely moved for hours on end, didn’t betray anything, and he worried that, if she had, the calumnies would have spread even further, and the sniggers and whispers would have ripped her and him to pieces. He rubbed his face, recalling her startling composure. Rigid, at attention, a soldier in his beleaguered army.
He didn’t tell Virginia what the senators whispered — if he’d tried to marry her, if they’d had sex before the Court decided Loving v. Virginia, they’d have been arrested, and wasn’t it ironic — the Court made Clarence’s dick legal in Virginia, in Virginia? The Capitol’s dirty joke. Their dry Yankee lips cracked into bloodless grins.
The room’s high ceilings dwarfed him. Clarence glanced at a stack of legal papers. His wife was unassailable and white, but under their vicious spotlight her skin looked pasty and sick. She clung to him through his humiliation, even when disgrace lingered like the smell of shit. And now she bore the tainted mark with him.
Clarence had absorbed Daddy’s lessons, he could keep everything inside, all of it. He watched his grandfather’s bust, half expecting it to move, but it only stared down at him from the shelf. Clarence picked the receiver up again and put it down again. He was in that weird trance, and breathed in slowly, to calm himself, and breathed out slowly, to stay calm, and then closed his eyes. Clarence would leave that woman alone, leave her be, and, anyway, what was the sense, what was there to say years later, and there’d be consequences.
He was weary of scrubbing.
When he won, when the seat was his, he watched his friends’ joy, black and white, and they embraced him, slapped him on the back — remember what’s important, what it’s for, our principles, it’s all worth it. Clarence was the blackest Supreme Court justice in the land, the blackest this country would ever see. He held that inside him, too, and patted his round belly.
Clarence liked to joke about his heft, his gravitas, with his friends and the other Justices. When he delivered his rare speeches, he occasionally mentioned his girth, which drew a laugh, since his body was a source of mirth. Sometimes his hands rested on his stomach during sessions, when he was courtly if mute. The court watchers noted that he never asked questions, they remarked on it until they finally stopped. Clarence felt he didn’t have to say a word. He’d talk if he wanted, and he preferred not to.
When his hair turned white, like Clinton’s, that other fallen brother, Virginia said he looked distinguished, not old. Still, she worried about his weight, she didn’t want to lose him. He hushed her. He intended to be on the bench as long as he could, at least as long as Thurgood Marshall. He looked at Daddy again, eternally silenced, and sometimes talked to him, telling him almost everything. Clarence could hear Daddy, he could hear his voice always. He knew what he’d say.
Clarence’s trial bulged fat inside him. He’d never forget his ordeal, not a moment of it. He closed his briefcase and felt the urge to push Daddy from his perch. He would never let anyone forget his trial. Clarence chuckled suddenly, and a harsh, guttural noise escaped from him like a runaway slave. He’d have the last laugh, he was color blind, and they’d all pay in the end.
The title “Give Us Some Dirt” is taken from Clarence Thomas’ testimony during the hearings, October 1991.
Playing Hurt
Abigail planned on retiring at forty and kidded around with her friends about how she’d better lay her golden eggs fast. But all bearers of wishes and jokes are also serious. In the future, she would be her own benevolent despot, spend what she had accumulated, and indulge herself. Maybe study Chinese or Arabic, certainly Latin, shave her head, if she wanted, because, literally, she would have earned it.