Odyssey Read Online Free Page A

other reason.
    “You have to understand, Doctor, I look at work as a political act. All other things being equal—it doesn’t matter about the race or gender of the employee but only their attitude.”
    “And Valentina was thankful,” Offeran said.
    “She came home with me and stayed until late that night. Two weeks later she left Verso and got a place about eight blocks from my apartment building. She made it clear that she would be my girlfriend but that we could never marry or have a conventional life together.”
    “How did that make you feel?”
    “I had a girlfriend then,” Sovereign said. “Her name was, still is, Claudette. Claudy had been talkin’ to me about kids for almost a year. ‘It’s time for me to start a family,’ she’d say before we went to bed, and, ‘You know I want to have a little girl,’ she’d say when we woke up in the morning. Almost every day she’d say something about it, especially after we had sex.”
    “And you didn’t want to have a child with her,” the doctor concluded.
    “
She
didn’t want to have a child with me.”
    “But she said—”
    “She said that she wanted a baby, that she wanted a little girl. She never asked me if I wanted it. She was asking me to give her a baby like it was a gift or something.”
    “So you felt left out.”
    “Let me ask you something, Doctor.”
    “What’s that, Mr. James?”
    “If you had a patient tell you that he got shot in the chest, would you ask him if he
felt
like he was attacked?”
    “I understand.”
    “I hope so,” Sovereign James said. “ ’Cause Claudette wanted her own baby and her own family and I just happened to be the sperm donor who was on the other side of the bed at the time.”
    “Did you want a child?”
    “Not that child.”
    “But what did you want, Sovereign?”
    “I wanted a woman to take me by the hand, look me in the eye, and say, ‘I want your baby, daddy. Yours.’ ”
    “And Claudette said that she wanted her own child.”
    “Only reason I had to be in the room was that she couldn’t do it any other way.”
    “But that’s not completely true,” Offeran countered. “She wanted you to father that child, those children, and to be with her as they grew.”
    “I’m a romantic, Dr. Offeran,” Sovereign said after a brief silence. “I might be black, blind, and a revolutionary to boot, but I believe that a child between a man and a woman doesn’t have anything to do with a biological clock or a hormonal timetable.”
    “You’re looking right into my eyes, Mr. James.”
    “I am? Because I don’t see a damn thing.”

    “Hey, Mr. James,” Roger Jones hailed from his window at the vestibule of the building.
    Roger was the young doorman who helped him on the first day. They had been talking for a few days now.
    “Hey, Roger.”
    “Reuben is waiting at the corner. He couldn’t park in front of the building like usual.”
    “Okay.”
    “They gonna let you get back to work soon?”
    “I don’t know yet. Everybody says that I’m not really blind and I’m just makin’ all this up.”
    “How can they say that when they see how you are?”
    “People believe in all kinds of things, Roger. That’s why the world is almost always at war.”
    “I don’t get you.”
    “If people weren’t so damn sure that they’re right all the time maybe we’d talk more and get things straight.”
    That night Sovereign went over the talk with Offeran in minute detail. He had taken to doing this every night. The specifics of his conversations were almostvisible in his mind.
    Is Claudette a black woman?
the doctor had asked.
    Sure is. And fine too. That woman got a rump get me hot just to think about it
.
    If you’re a racial revolutionary and you obviously want children, then wouldn’t Claudette be the perfect choice?
he asked.
    That’s half the way there, Doctor. But you got to remember—any child I produce will be a black child in this racist nation. And the woman who bears my child