Akwasi Agyeman

Please forgive me for the wrong I've done
...Now I know what it means to love someone

In the summer of 1964 I was between my junior and senior years of college, 21 years old and working in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At that time, Atlantic City was the place to be on the East Coast of the United States. This was a time before people took airplanes or cruises to the Caribbean islands. If people on the East Coast went on vacation, they came to Atlantic City. Thus, it was an ideal place for a college kid to find work and play. If you worked twelve to sixteen hours a day you could save enough money to pay for college. At night there were girls everywhere, vacationing girls and college girls, the college girls were also working summer jobs. You mostly spent the weeknights with them, sharing meals, playing cards, going to the movies, hanging out on the beach. The vacationing girls who had money to spend and wanted escorts were available on the weekends.

On any Friday or Saturday night you could stand on almost any corner and, providing you were dressed properly, you could get a date- sometimes for a show, sometimes for the night, and sometimes for the weekend. By the way, proper dress was slacks, a Ban Lon shirt and dress shoes. At the beginning of the summer you would buy a pair of dark slacks and three new Ban Lon's. By wearing them only at night and sending them to the dry cleaners, they would look new all summer. At 21, I was a master of this corner game. I was so slick I was the guy who could break a girl's heart and make her apologize.

The Democratic National Convention came to town that summer and this particular weekend the streets were packed. On Friday night I was standing on the corner of Arctic Avenue and Kentucky, my favorite corner. I saw her first; at least I think I did. She was tall about 5'6" or 7"-hard to tell with her heels on -graceful-, had pretty brown skin, and no makeup. She wore a simple black dress and a single string of pearls. She stood out in the crowd. I mean this girl had class . Her look was polished, smooth, professional. She was not wearing the typical sundress and sandals of the tourist. As I walked towards her I knew my regular lines were not gong to work, I was going to have to hit her with my ninth rap and that better be hard and deep. Hey, I thought, I might even have to regroup and get a suit to hang with her. Just at that moment our eyes met. I recognized her: J.R.

* * * * * *

In the fall of 1961, I was a freshman at Delaware State College. Like all freshman boys I was trying to establish myself and get a girlfriend. I was one of three guys who liked Miss T, and for the first two weeks of school we openly competed for her. She finally settled on one of the others. Another freshman girl approached me and asked, "since things didn't work out between you and Miss T, would you be interested in meeting someone?" Turns out she had a foster sister who was a high school senior in Philadelphia.

Of course I said yes and the next Sunday J.R. came down to campus. I was 18, turning 19 in November and she was 17 turning 18 in October. We talked all day long, had afternoon dinner together in the dining hall, walked all over the campus, set on grass under the trees in front of the A-Building, told each other our life stories and what we wanted to do, and shared our dreams. She wanted to attend Maryland State College, our sister school. She was a very resolute young woman, had a strong personality, and knew what she wanted. She was warm, friendly, could talk about anything, and had definite opinions.

I had never encountered anyone before with her background. Both her parents had been killed when she was five; she had no siblings, no aunts or uncles, and one grandmother who had not been able to take care of her and she was a Catholic. She had spent nearly her entire life in foster homes. She had lived with one particular family for the last five years. She also had a part-time job as a secretary in downtown Philadelphia. I invited her to come back for homecoming in mid-October. Before she boarded the Greyhound bus back to Philadelphia I kissed her. I was in Love.

Over the next few weeks we wrote each other, which included sending her a birthday card and I planned the homecoming weekend. She had made it very clear that she was a virgin and was going to marry as a virgin. Since she felt she "had nothing else", she was going to hold on to that aspect of herself.

She returned to campus on the Friday evening of Homecoming. We went to the ball and kissed as much as possible. She spent the night in the girl's dorm with her foster sister. Saturday we were together all day, except during the game when I ran the scoreboard.

That evening we went to the dance, and after the dance I had made arrangements to go to an after-party off-campus. She knew that if she went to the after-party she could not get into the dorm (whose doors were locked at midnight) and would have to spend the night with me. She also knew that all I had to offer was a parked car that I had borrowed, yet she agreed. The after-party finished, it was cold and raining, and we were parked in the lot in back of the boy's dorm. The streetlights were bright and casting an eerie glow because of the rain, but it was still well lit in the car. I got two blankets out of my room and we wrapped up to keep warm. Of course, my hands and lips were working as hard as they could, but J.R.'s resolve was not to be broken, and it had the help of a full-length panty girdle. Those things ran from the navel to midthigh; you couldn't get down into them from above or up from below. They were by far the best birth control, pro-virgin devices ever made. We had a long cold night of heavy petting.

Sunday we went to breakfast, spent the day together, and she took the evening bus back to Philadelphia. We wrote each other long letters each week, from that point on. She came down once again in November, and we spent another long, cold night wrapped up in blankets in a car.

I had come to college that fall with enough money to register and the hope of receiving an athletic scholarship. By November, my hope had evaporated and my mother had co-signed a loan for me to pay the balance of the fees due. The repayment of that loan was due to begin in February. Christmas came, and I was unable (no job, no money) to get to Philadelphia to see J.R.

January brought a number of events. In mid January the semester ended, and because I had no money and a loan due, I dropped out of school and found a job in Philadelphia. I moved in with one of my father's sisters, Aunt Laura, and paid her $5.00 a week for a room. I had to share a bed with my oldest brother, who was also renting from her. In addition to my aunt, another first cousin also lived in the house. No one cooked, except my aunt sometimes did on Sundays, so I was on my own for food. I had a job as a banquet houseman at the Marriott on City Line Avenue and my aunt's house was in West Philadelphia. The job paid $1.00 per hour and was a 40-hour-a-week job with no overtime. After taxes I took home $34.00. The $5.00 rent left me with $29.00; a $15.00 payment on the loan left me with $14.00; and after $4.00 for car fare, I was left me with $10.00 for the week, with which I had to eat and conduct my social affairs. Nevertheless, I was in Philadelphia and so was J.R.

In January, J.R. also graduated from high school. On the first of February I called her house, only to be told that she didn't live there anymore and they didn't know where she was. She called me after a couple of days and told me that on Feb. 1, because she had finished high school and was 18, the foster care program had cut her off. Without the promise of state money coming in, the family she had spent the last five years with had put her out. She was staying with a girlfriend who was "shacking" with her boyfriend in a one-bedroom apartment. I went over to see J.R. and it was a real tight situation. The girl's boyfriend was a real pain. I didn't like his vibe at all and we did not get along from jump. A week later J.R. called me very upset, and I went over. She told me she had lost her part time job because her boss demanded that she sleep with him, and when she wouldn't he fired her. She was looking through the want ads but had no money for carfare to go to interviews. She did not want to stay where she was and wanted us to get married.

J.R. needed everything, physical and emotional. She needed a father and a mother, a sister and a brother, and a husband, and she needed me to be all of them. I loved her but I wasn't that strong and was barely surviving myself. There was no room in my aunt's house and, in any case, I didn't feel I could ask my aunt for help. I had discussed J.R. with my older brother, and he had advised me against marriage. He was planning to marry, but he was 26. My other brother who was 23 was already married and had two children. Both brothers had gone into the Army right out of high school. They had had a lot more life experiences than I had, and I felt my oldest brother's advice was best.

J.R. and I sat on the stairs in the cold hallway of her girlfriend's apartment building that night, and she cried. I tried to appear strong, but the situation was bigger than me. I had been raised to be physically tough and I was, but emotionally I was shallow. I had no idea how to get in touch with my feelings, so my reaction to emotional situations was to walk away from them or pretend they didn't exist. I didn't know how to handle this one and this not knowing caused me pain, pain that I didn't know how to handle. What about my dreams? I thought, panicked. I wanted to go back to college, I wasn't ready for marriage. I had no place to take her, I reasoned, and nothing to offer. Actually, I did have something, I had relatives and family friends all over Philadelphia. If I could have gotten past my pain to see hers completely, I could have found a solution, I know now. For me to offer only my friendship was too painful then. This wasn't a game played out in the back seat of a car, this was real, too real and uncomfortable for me. [ A few years later, with more experience in the game of life, I would learn how to play the emotions a vulnerable woman feels to my advantage, and after I would get what I wanted use those same emotions to make her feel guilty for burdening me with them. Many, many, many years later I would begin to learn how to deal with my emotions and not walk away].

This encounter with J.R. was not a game though. I cared for her, and I didn't know how to or maybe I didn't want to help her. It hurt, so I did what I had learned to do. I walked away. No, I ran away . I looked in my pocket and found that I had eight bus tokens. I gave her the tokens so she could look for a job. I didn't cry with her, I didn't reassure her, I didn't hold her, I didn't promise anything. I left telling her--not in words but in body language--that I was never coming back. I never returned and she never called me.

* * * * *

On that Atlantic City street corner J.R. appeared polite, let me talk for about five minutes, declined to have a drink with me, would not give me her address or phone number, told me nothing about herself. She said she had to go. Her exact words were "sorry bout that" and walked off into the crowd, leaving me to forever wonder if she was with someone, if she was married, if she had children, if she had become a nun or if she was working this convention as hard as I was working this corner.

Every night on my knees I pray
Oh please, forgive me for the wrong I've done...

The Temptations

Cover Design: Joseph McNair