*These were lonely times for me. I don’t recall what I did that Christmas. In January of 1987, I was still in Baton Rouge at LSU. I do not believe I saw anyone during that holiday -- neither Mona Lisa nor Ella Jean. I am sure I was very depressed, just holding out. I had made no real friends at LSU. I am sure, however, that I was busy with the Christian material. I had just completed my first semester at LSU and wrote a paper on the idioms used by Christian in his poems and the paper didn't go over very well with one of my professors. I didn't like the fellow, though he is quite well-known among scholars of black literature. I think he might have become Mona Lisa's dissertation advisor. He was quite fond of black women writers, like Zoa Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. I believe, as a white professor, he was quite uneasy around black males.

I don’t know whether I ever saw Ella Jean again or not. I recall I made her a loan of money before I left New Orleans to get her house fixed up. She sent me photos of every room in the house. It was very pretty. I did not really expect the money back and it didn’t matter. I am sure I talked to her again on the phone December of 1987 or January of 1988 after I returned to Baltimore. For she had committed credit card fraud. She had faked my name and pretended she was my wife and had run up an $1800 bill. I didn’t find out about it until I returned to Baltimore.

My buddy Fred Mason was then working for Archway Ford as a salesman and I had gotten a job with 1199 again. The officers at 1199 thought my Volkswagon bug wasn’t the appropriate kind of car for a union organizer. Fred decided to sell me one of his Fords, a brand new one (more or less, a salesman had used it). When my credit was checked, Jean’s fraud was discovered. The success of what she had done made have been assisted because Mama’s name was Ella Lewis and she was exceedingly punctilious in paying her debts. Ella Jean sent me some money and said she would take care of the problem. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. It really didn’t matter ultimately, for truly I was in her debt despite what she had done. She had been kind to me. Very sweet. In a way, I betrayed her trust.

The last I heard from her she had married a white man who worked at the same car plant that she worked. She was a good woman. I didn’t do right by her and I am sorry about it. So I wasn’t really sanctimonious about the problem with the credit card. Maybe it was her way of paying me back, of getting even, for all the problems I had put her through. She was just someone looking for love, as they say, in all the wrong places. That is the situation for most of us. I bought an Escort GT. I was then thirty-nine. It was the first time I had ever bought anything on credit.