“If you really think guilt is what I feel after having sacrificed so much of my life into helping you surmount your fears and qualms, then I don’t suppose you know me that well.”
“Vivian, you know that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean Grant? After all the aid and counseling I’ve given you to recover from your miserable life, you just want to think this through like it’s not a big deal?”
“How dare you speak to me like that? Do you think it has been easy for me recovering from Jefferson’s trial? Do you really think I wasn’t going to feel regret about abandoning the people that sent me to university in the first place?
“If you don’t care about us, our future as couple, then I might as well not care either Grant”
“Vivian, please don’t do this”
“Goodbye Grant.”
She slammed the door behind her and left the house. I guess this was the end of a relationship that had taken too many bumps along the way. It was good while it lasted, but I presume an ambitious woman like Vivian with plans thought out for the future, wouldn’t want to be with a guy that was still stuck and living on the so-not distant past. I took my car keys and left my aunt’s house to give myself some quiet time to reflect about what just happened. I opened the door of my brand new Ford, dropping a few tears in the steering wheel, and disappeared into the sunrise.
Jefferson’s execution had been a massive blow for many people. Miss Emma hadn’t been the same since, buying herself a cat to keep her company and only leaving the house to get a hold of the daily newspaper. Tante Lou got fever one week after the incident, and is still waiting to recover from it. For Reverend Ambrose, the recovery was fast and efficient, without taking into account the car accident he encountered right after leaving the penitentiary. Everything had gone from bad to worse ever since, but to say so about me and Vivian was just an understatement. We had always had our differences in what ethics and beliefs regarded, but we chose to not let them interfere in our relationship. This utterly changed after the execution of Jefferson, as tension started to intensify, leading to random fights over insignificant anecdotes. One of the most repeated ones was the argument we always seemed to start every time I started talking about the influence Jefferson’s eye-opening experience could have in my students, to become more than just black inhabitants of the white repression. If Jefferson could change himself from a hog to the bravest man in the execution room, then perhaps I could change the student’s outcome in society.
This new approach to life had also given me the faith to accept God as a true individual, and allow religion as a pursuit to the happiness we would all be having in a remote future. It’s amusing how a couple of months could drastically alter a man’s notion and lifestyle, but then again Jefferson had done so in just a few weeks. I was still meditating everything that had altered my life during these past few months, when I unexpectedly crashed into a car. I lost conscious, but not for long, because when I recovered from the calamity, the driver of the smashed car was standing in front of me with a pair of brass knuckles in both hands. He was a black middle aged man, with arms the size of my legs, and with a glance I had never seen in my life. I tried to desperately escape, to the point that I had to drag my way into the road seeing as I had broken my heel. It was of no use; he held my legs and started punching me mercilessly in the stomach. I was dreadfully thinking of a way to escape, when all of a sudden the fatal beating stopped and I fell unconscious once again.
I opened my eyes and all I could see was the mere sunlight shimmering straight into my eyes. As I reopened them, I saw a Christ-like figure standing in front of me, with his arm stretched out, to help me stand up. He was a tall white-colored teenager.
“You O.K. there chap?” He asked.
“Wh-what happened?”
“You got into a little trouble with the big guy over there.” He said pointing at the unconscious colored man inside the car. “I had to get you out of it.”
“You risked your own life, trying to save me? A colored person?
“I’m sure you would have done the same for me.”
“But I don’t understand…don’t you feel hatred and repulsion, when standing next to me?
“Why would I?”
“Because I’m black!”
“What has that to do with whether I find you likeable or not. We shouldn’t judge people by their appearance or exterior, but by what they symbolize inside.”
I stared motionless at the sky, briefly meditating.
“Well, it was nice to meet you.” He said. “Have a nice day!”
As I laid immobile in the middle of the road, my conscience came to haunt me once again with more doubts and uncertainties that I could handle. How could I have been so primitive and dull to think all white people were comparable in any way? The hazy and ambiguous reflections of a stereotypical white man I had had were just as insulting as the ones we, colored people, had to endure every single day. In a way, rising above the prejudice was something everyone had to do at one point in their lives, and I wasn’t going to be the only one to achieve it.
