Up at the College Read online

  “Girl, take a chill pill,” Trina told her, hoping that the men would hurry up and finish with those cigars to come back in and hang out with them. Curtis of all people needed to relax with some good company—especially the company of a good woman like Yvonne.

  As far as Trina was concerned, Curtis spent too much of his precious time boo-boo kittying with the wrong kind of women. And maybe they weren’t just the wrong kind of women. Perhaps they were the worst kind of women.

  Ironically, not a one of Curtis’s women could technically be branded as a skank, hoochie, skoochie, or even a skeezer. If only it were that easy. No, these sisters were those well-dressed, educated, stuck-up old sticks-in-the-mud who thought more highly of themselves than they should. They were like those dry clouds Jesus accused the Pharisees of being—so many promises, so little action, so empty and dry and useless, their very presence a sin and a shame.

  Trina believed that Yvonne was a blessing waiting to happen as far as Curtis was concerned. It was pretty clear that Curtis thought the girl was fine. Not to mention the way he smiled and chuckled at just about everything that little negro had said so far this evening. Every time Miss Yvonne said a little quip about something, all she heard from Coach was “Ha … ha … hahahaha, ha … ha … hahahaha.” Yvonne was funny. But that negro wasn’t that funny.

  Curtis Parker wasn’t the only one who was thunderstruck. Yvonne was just as taken with him as he with her. But Yvonne was in the hole with regard to cool points, so she was working overtime to try and hide her attraction to him. Trina knew the girl would rather die a thousand horrible deaths in consecutive order than have Curtis discover he was getting next to her. Yet, the best thing that could happen to Yvonne was for Curtis to be an eyewitness to the beautiful ruby blush that spread across her cocoa-colored cheeks, lighting up those sparkling chocolate-diamond-colored eyes, simply because of the sparks bouncing back and forth between the two of them.

  It was time for Yvonne to have a good, handsome, and decent man to take notice of and appreciate her. When Yvonne was married to Darrell, she worked overtime to get along with that boy and keep the marriage intact. It was amazing. Darrell had earned a PhD in biology from Stanford University, and yet he acted as if he were mentally challenged whenever Yvonne tried to talk to him about the problems in their marriage. No matter what she said and how she said it, Darrell just didn’t get it.

  Darrell didn’t want to understand that it was inappropriate for a woman from his department to call his house and hang up whenever Yvonne answered the phone. He didn’t get it when Yvonne told him that Bettina was rude and nasty whenever she came to the house, and that perhaps he needed to get her straight.

  Yvonne had tried and tried to explain, petition, and help Darrell understand the problem—but always to no avail. It was as if she had been speaking a remote foreign language. But once Yvonne rededicated her life to the Lord, went back to her home church—Fayetteville Street Gospel United Church—and dived headfirst into the Word of God, she told Trina that the Lord blessed her with an answer to that problem.

  It had been on one of those hard nights, the ones when the reality of being divorced got to you. Yvonne was on her knees doing a bang-up job with the divorce thing—crying uncontrollably, hollering, flinging snot, hanging all on the bedpost, calling out, “Whyyyyyy, God, whyyyyyy” in that raspy, gravelly, annoying pity-party, crying voice. She was on a roll with that thing and threw in some real good, desperate, and pitiful-sounding “Why me,” “What’s wrong with me, Jesus,” “Why You let this happen, Lawwwwddd, You da’ Alpha and da Omega,” “Why come he gets to have all the fun, Lawd,” “Jesus, what is taking You so long” and “Why, Lawd, why.”

  That night Yvonne ranted and raved as if she’d lost all of her brain cells. And the good Lord let Yvonne cut the monkey fool until she was exhausted, her eyes were swollen shut, and her voice was gone. At that point, while she was lying on the floor too tired to move, face wet and practically plastered to the rug, a calm came over her, warming her heart and giving Yvonne a peace that transcended her ability to understand how the Lord had calmed her completely down after all of that craziness.

  When Yvonne was calmed down enough to get still enough to hear the Lord speak, she felt the words from 1 John 4:4–6 being whispered deep in her heart.

  “But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won your fight with these false prophets, because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world. These people belong to this world, so they speak from the world’s viewpoint, and the world listens to them. But we belong to God; that is why those who know God listen to us. If they do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has the Spirit of truth or the spirit of deception.”

  Those words came home to Yvonne with such force that she hopped up off of that floor and starting shouting, her voice returning with each increase of praise. God had let her know that there was no way that anybody, Darrell included, could hear and receive a word of wisdom if they didn’t know the Lord, didn’t care if they knew the Lord, and weren’t trying to know Him, if their very lives depended on it. The Darrells of this world couldn’t and wouldn’t hear a thing because the spirit of deception that operated through them made it impossible for them to do anything but do their best to scheme, trick, plot, and contrive.

  Trina believed that Yvonne wasn’t the only one in need of attention from somebody with some sense. Curtis, in spite of his reputation as a playah, was long overdue to meet somebody like Yvonne—a woman who would make him laugh, be his best friend, pray for him, pray with him, have his back, understand him, jack his tail up when he needed to tighten up on a few things, and love him the way God called a woman to love a man. But most important, Curtis needed a woman for whom Jesus was Lord of her life. A woman who loved the Lord like that knew how to love her man right. Because she would do what the Lord told her to do where he was concerned.

  Trina peeped through the blinds at Curtis and Maurice puffing on those expensive cigars. It always tickled her to no end to watch Maurice lean back and take a real long puff, then ease back up while blowing the cigar smoke out of his mouth like he was really doing something.

  FOUR

  Curtis liked to take short puffs of his cigar so he could taste the tobacco better. He puffed a few more times, looking up and smiling at the twinkling stars in the velvety, midnight-blue Carolina sky. Curtis loved himself a Carolina sky—especially on a warm fall evening like this one. It felt good to look up and see evidence of God watching him tonight. Because Curtis desperately needed evidence that God was watching, and better yet willing to help him. If the past couple of practices were any indication of the team’s state and readiness, he might as well go back to the office right now and clean out his desk. And if his boss, Gilead Jackson, had had anything to do with it, Curtis would have been kicked off campus right after they lost the first two games of the season.

  He unclipped his phone from his belt and pulled up the team’s last season stats. He shook his head, shut down the Internet, and turned the phone off. Team stats, team needs, team issues, and team problems. It seemed as if that was all he and Maurice dealt with. He closed his eyes and felt these words from 1 John 2 being spoken directly to his heart.

  “Stop loving this evil world and all that it offers you, for when you love the world, you show that you do not have the love of the Father in you. For this world offers only the lust for physical pleasure, the lust for everything we see, and pride in our possessions. These are not from the Father: They are from this evil world. And this world is fading away, along with everything it craves. But if you do the will of God, you will live forever.”

  Curtis didn’t know why he was remembering, word for word, this scripture his grandmother had e-mailed him a week ago. Gran Gran was very concerned that the things of this world held way too much appeal to him over the things of God. He tried to deny that claim. But now, sitting here consumed with wanting to beat
out all of the other teams in the Southeastern Negro Athletic Conference (SNAC), he knew that his mind and heart were completely absorbed with the things of this world. Curtis sighed and looked up at the sky, blinking back tears that came from the double-edged sword of conviction from the Word. What was wrong with him—a grown-tailed man sniffling up like a lil’ wimp.

  “So,” Maurice said, eyeing Curtis curiously and wondering what had caused this level of sorrow to come up on him like that. “Are the stats for the mighty Fighting Panthers so bad I should dust off the old résumé?”

  “I can’t believe you, the man of God, are talking that mess, Maurice,” Curtis admonished.

  Maurice, like his boy Lamont Green’s brother James, was a brother strong in the Word and strong in faith in the Lord. And Curtis always depended on him to see the problem through those lenses that most praying, faith-filled saints viewed the world through. Curtis’s grandmother was like that. No matter what was going on, Doreatha Parker, or Gran Gran, always took the problem to God, left her problem at the altar, praised God for his blessings in her life, and waited in perfect peace for the answer to that prayer to become manifest.

  Now here was Maurice, standing right in his face, blowing cigar circles out of his mouth, and acting like he didn’t need to be combing through his Bible searching for a Word from the Lord about this dilemma.

  “What is your problem?” Maurice asked, now just as calm and content, despite the stats and impending doom coming from a messed-up team and, even worse, a mean and crazy athletic director.

  “My problem?” Curtis asked.

  “Yeah,” Maurice answered. “Your problem. Look, Curtis, I love the Lord. I trust the Lord. But I’m faithful, not perfect. Every now and then, I am going to have a moment, even if it’s only for a moment.”

  “But you walk by faith and not by sight, man,” Curtis told him.

  Maurice could not believe this boy. He said, “Of course I walk by faith and not by what I see with these things”—Maurice pointed at his eyes—“but what about you, Curtis? What are you walking by? And why do you lean so hard on my faith instead of getting in the Word and building up your own self in faith and trust in God? Honestly, I don’t know how you can stand to live life without total dependence on Jesus.”

  “’Cause I’m a man. I believe in working and fighting hard for what I believe in.”

  “So, Jesus, the one you are called to put your trust in, wasn’t a man, a man’s man to be exact? ’Cause I don’t think a roughneck like Peter, and a smooth thug like Matthew, would have been following and chilling with Jesus if He’d been all wimpy and punkin’ out on some brothers.

  “You think those brothers whose money tables Jesus threw over were happy with Him? Don’t you think that at least one of them got riled up and ready to throw down, but something, namely Jesus, made them think twice about doing that? I’ve seen plenty of hard-core thugs in my day. But I’ve never seen any of them roll up on somebody who gave the clear indication that they were not the one to mess with.”

  Curtis couldn’t argue against that point. There was nothing in the Word that indicated Jesus had any problems, discussions, or pending altercations following that bodacious confrontation. He knew from coaching all of these years that any brother bold enough to throw down like Jesus did in the temple had better be able to back that up. There were some rough folks back in the Bible days. But it was pretty clear that you didn’t just take a mind to roll up on Jesus. A few Pharisees tried but they got their feelings hurt.

  “Okay,” Curtis said with his hands raised in concession, “you have a point.”

  “You daggone skippy I do,” Maurice said. “When did a person not have a point with the Word? It’s a—”

  “I know,” Curtis replied, irritated. “It’s an infallible, double-edged sword that does not return void. So what else is new?”

  Maurice wanted to kick Curtis’s butt. He was his boy and he loved him like a brother. But doggone it, if that negro didn’t try the patience of Job. And Maurice knew he was nowhere near a Job, so his patience was shot. He said, “Why does this have to be so hard for you, Curtis? It’s the Lord. He is a mighty, loving, gracious, and awesome God. Why do you persist in running from Him and your blessings?

  “Don’t you know that when you submit to the Lord, He is going to show you, show us, exactly what to do with this team? And there won’t be a thing that Gilead Jackson and his flunkies Kordell Bivens and Castilleo Palmer can do about it. We just don’t know how He is going to do it. And that’s okay because we don’t need to know all of that. Jesus ain’t never worked on a need-to-know basis with anybody. Okay?”

  Curtis knew that Maurice was right. But he wasn’t willing to give his life completely over to the Lord because there were some things that he wanted to keep doing that he knew the Lord did not approve of. For starters, he’d have to relinquish what Trina referred to as his “stash of booty-call boos”—the women he could call to get his needs met without explanation or commitment of any kind. They would have to be the first thing to go. Just the thought of letting go of all of that ran his pressure up. What was a brother supposed to do to relieve some tension? Get married?

  Next he would have to kick his so-called head boo, Regina Young, to the curb. Curtis knew better than any of his nay-saying friends that Regina, an agnostic, was not the one. She looked good on his arm and didn’t give him a hard time about his other women. Regina liked the prestige of being the coach’s public girlfriend too much to complain to him about things a woman like Yvonne would have checked faster than she could blink her eye.

  But being with a woman like Regina Young got old real fast because women like Regina had little or no substance. While they may have had the look of a treasure, they were no more than a cheap piece of cubic zirconium. And women like Regina didn’t even know that they were not jewels. They believed the hype about themselves and thought that their looks, education, airs, and so-called skills in the bedroom really and actually made them somebody.

  Once a man got a good dose of Regina Young, he found himself longing for a simple, honest woman who didn’t backstab, harbor secret agendas, or have unreasonable demands. It helped Curtis understand why a wealthy brother like Metro Mitchell, the owner of Yeah Yeah, Durham’s hottest hip-hop store, was so enamored with his ghetto-fabulous baby mama, Dayeesha Hamilton, who worked at the Kroger on Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. The girl was as ghetto as she could be sometimes. But she was good people. Dayeesha was honest, dependable, a good cook, kept a clean and orderly home, wasn’t greedy, and was a hardworking young woman.

  Thinking about how happy Metro Mitchell had been the last time he ran into him with Dayeesha on his arm was enough to make Curtis give serious consideration to canceling out his playah’s card. But all of that was a whole lot easier said than done because Curtis wanted to remain in control of everything. It scared him to think about giving the Lord such complete control of his life. Plus, if he gave over that kind of control, he’d also have to step back and let God do the talking where women were concerned. He liked to be able to select a woman based on his perception of a need that had to be met. And Curtis knew that if God started picking his women, first off there would not be any women, just the good lil’ Christian girl the Lord saw fit to place in his path.

  Maurice snuffed out his cigar on the railing and sat down on the deck bench. He stretched his arms across the back and glanced upward, lips moving but no sound coming out. He didn’t know how they were going to make it through the season going like this.

  Curtis was bound and determined to run from the Lord the way Maurice wished some of those players would run down that court to score some points. Every victory and every defeat this season would be riding on what Curtis did or didn’t do regarding getting close to the Lord. Folks didn’t get it that your walk with the Lord directly affected how you went about your business from day to day.

  They were just coming out of the early part of the season and had yet to win anything. Th
ey had gotten beaten so badly in an exhibition game with North Carolina Central University, a MEAC Conference school, that Maurice dreaded having to drive down the part of Fayetteville Street where NCCU was located.

  That had hurt real bad. There was fierce rivalry between the two schools. NCCU, or Central, was pretty much down the street from Eva T. It had been founded a good decade and a half before Eva T. It had produced many of Durham’s black movers and shakers, and the students, alumni, and faculty alike never failed to remind Eva T. that NCCU was the real black college in Durham.

  The last thing Maurice had wanted to hear at that game was the buzzer of the final quarter sounding off with a final game score of 78 to 20. Central beat them by fifty-eight points. And that had only happened because one of NCCU’s star players fouled out, another one was on crutches, and a third was sitting on the bench nursing a swollen eye with an ice pack.

  If that spanking had not been bad enough, this game was played on Eva T.’s home turf. Eva T.’s president, Dr. Samuel T. Redmond, had sat through the game looking so mean and evil until there was a moment when Maurice could have sworn he was filling out pink slips. And the worst part was that this game paid both teams—$55,000 to the victor and $18,000 to the loser, if they didn’t allow the winning team to keep more than a ten-point lead. In the case of the final score, Eva T. Marshall was eligible for a measly $3,000. That chump change would barely feed the members of the entire team entourage. The cheerleaders alone ate like they were all active members of an NFL team.

  The season was relatively new, and the sinkhole they were in just kept getting deeper and deeper. And if that was not bad enough, Curtis’s stubborn behind was stuck on being stupid and resisting getting right with the Lord. Gran Gran had told Curtis that he could expect to walk in some serious valleys if he kept playing “you can’t see me” with God. And now they were standing in the middle of the valley, it was starting to rain, they didn’t have any covering, their feet were sinking down in the mud, and Curtis remained intentionally clueless concerning what he needed to do. About the only hope Maurice had at the moment was that Gran Gran had offered to bring her prayer group, The Prayer Warriors, to practice to lay hands on and anoint the team.