My Soul to Keep Read Online Free PDF

to the sadness at home, but now she had reason to dread it even more.

3
     
    If someone had told Jessica Jacobs, at twenty, that she had recently met the man she would marry, she wouldn’t have thought to include David Wolde on her list of possibilities. Far from it.
    She would have hoped he was Shane, the pro-bound UM fullback she’d had a frenzied petting session with after an Omega party at the beginning of the semester. Or even Lawrence, the lanky physics major who sat with her at the student union, but couldn’t muster the nerve to ask her out. She might even have believed it was Michel, the tight-jawed president of the Black Student Caucus, who called her “little sister” and would have had potential if he’d remembered to sprinkle in some fun between bouts of righteous indignation.
    But not David Wolde. He didn’t fit any side of her at all, at least not any she’d discovered yet.
    Granted, she couldn’t concentrate on a word he said the first day she sat in his Intermediate Spanish tutorial because she was so absorbed by his face, and not just his startling beauty. (Beauty, she’d decided, even now, was the only word to describe his face’s impression, an assortment of complementary features.) He simply looked unusual. He was black, that was certain. His unblemished skin was a rich clay-brown, and his tightly curled hair was kinky if somewhat wispy. But the slope of his forehead and nose, and his burnt-sienna lips, made him look nearly Middle Eastern, or some mix from somewhere far from the United States. Moorish descent, maybe. He spoke Spanish like a native, with a slight Castilian lisp. Yet, on the rare occasions he spoke English in class, the accent was touched by a ring of the unfamiliar. His face and his voice, in harmony, were a mystery that captivated Jessica from the start.
    That aside, nothing else about Dr. Wolde (he pronounced it WOL-day, but everyone usually shortened it to WOLD) encouraged romantic thoughts. He almost never smiled, never flirted in the least, and his dark eyes lighted on male and female students with equal indifference. He looked young, possibly thirty, but carried himself as though he were at least forty. He was an old-fashioned black college professor, the kind her mother described from her days at Fisk in the 1950s. They don’t play. They’re only about business. They make that white guy on The Paper Chase look like a doddering old pushover.
    There was no such thing as coasting in Dr. Wolde’s class. And if you were absent a day, upon your return he asked you to stand up in front of everyone and, in Spanish, explain why. He spoke rapidly, his cadences trilling up and down and all around them, never mind that the language was always a hair away from sounding like babble to them.
    Jessica had assumed Spanish was a blow-off course. In high school, she’d learned to conjugate verbs and her accent was all right, so she figured she’d slide by fine.
    She was wrong. Midway through the term, Dr. Wolde’s was the only class she was pulling a C in. She left his office near tears after an argument over a low mark on an essay she’d actually worked hard on. He’d marked off for accent marks that weren’t slanted just the way he liked. This was a damn elective. She was going into journalism, not foreign service. She didn’t need this shit.
    “We’re just learning,” she complained, nearly shouting.
    “If you’re learning,” he’d replied calmly, in English, “then what’s the problem?”
    During a flu epidemic that sidelined her other teachers at least one or two days, Dr. Wolde never got sick. The class prayed he would stay home just once. He never even got a sniffle.
    She could no longer see the beauty in his face. (“Isn’t that brother who teaches Spanish cute?” one of her friends asked her one day, and Jessica stared at the girl as if she’d lost her mind.) She no longer cared where the SOB was from; as far as she was concerned, he’d come from her worst