Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  Apparently the benefit made the other four hundred and ninety-nine attendees uncomfortable as well. Even though the concert and dinner had raised more than fifteen thousand dollars, both in ticket sales and on-site donations, no one was mentioning the money or the children.

  And neither were we. Laura and I were silent as we walked down the steps onto the pavement. I looked over my shoulder, an old habit, but I didn’t feel as uneasy as I usually did in the Loop. All of the people around me, except Laura, were black. For the first time in this part of the city, I felt as if I belonged.

  I slipped my arm around Laura, shielding her against the cold, and she stiffened, not leaning into me as she usually did when we were alone.

  I wasn’t sure if she was reacting that way because we were in a public place or because of the benefit. We tried not to touch when we were out in public—it simply invited too much trouble—but I didn’t feel as if we were in public here.

  Maybe Laura did. Or maybe she was still feeling stung from the reactions she had received inside the hotel. During the dinner, she had embarrassed me simply by being herself, and she had seen my reaction. However, I wasn’t sure if she knew what she had done wrong.

  She felt fragile against me, even though she wasn’t. She wore her blond hair up, giving her an illusion of height. Her high heels and her elaborate hairdo made her seem almost as tall as I was, although flat-footed she was much shorter than my six feet.

  The streetlights reflected off her pale skin. Her pretty features, accented by paler makeup, were set in a frown.

  A dozen cabs, aware that there would be fares this late on Easter Sunday, lined up in front of the Sherman House’s Clark Street entrance. Drunken patrons laughed as the valet whistled each cab forward.

  The rest of us walked to our cars. Laura’s was parked near the Chicago Loop Synagogue. From a distance, I could see the Hands of Peace sculpture hanging from the building’s façade. They seemed appropriate somehow—helping hands—and I almost pointed that out to Laura. But one more glance at her expression reminded me to remain silent.

  Her Mercedes 280SL was the only car on that block. It looked like the Hands of Peace were pointing at the vehicle.

  This part of the street was empty. The other patrons had veered off, and Laura and I were alone.

  The feeling of comfort left. The emptiness made me nervous, particularly since we were so well dressed. I was wearing a new suit, tailored to fit, and a topcoat of a type I’d only seen in movies. Laura wore a shimmering blue pantsuit that looked like a formal evening gown until she walked. Her shoes were open-toed. Her feet had to be cold now that we were outside.

  In the distance, car doors slammed, a few taxis honked their horns, and people called good-byes and Happy Easters to each other. A man drunkenly sang the title line from “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” and a woman sang the next line, her voice not as drunk or as out of tune. Neither singer sounded like Ella Fitzgerald.

  She had made the entire evening worthwhile. The dance floor in the old College Inn restaurant was lit with soft lights, the orchestra behind it. She used the space as if it were her own private stage until she got irritated that no one was dancing. Then she invited people forward.

  And of course they came.

  Laura’s heels clicked on the concrete and my tight new dress shoes answered with solid taps. I wondered what Laura was thinking. Maybe Ella Fitzgerald’s rich voice was reverberating in Laura’s head the way it was reverberating in mine.

  It wasn’t the closing number that kept threading its way through my thoughts. Much as I liked “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” it wasn’t my favorite Ella Fitzgerald tune. Instead, “Slumming on Park Avenue,” with its sly lyrics about spying on the rich the way they slummed to spy on the poor, had captured my mood.

  Ella Fitzgerald had segued into that song after an ill-advised set of rock ’n roll tunes. When she introduced “Slumming,” she had done so with a wide smile, knowing she was in a crowd of like-minded people.

  “It’s Irving Berlin’s way of letting all those rich white folks know how despicable their behavior can be,” she said, her eyes twinkling, the orchestra playing a musical backdrop behind her.

  At that moment, several people glanced at Laura. She was well known among people who followed the society pages, and apparently a lot of the upper-class blacks who shelled out fifteen dollars per person to come to this event read not only the Defender’s society pages, but the Tribune’s as well.

  As Laura and I reached the Mercedes, I scanned the area, looking for people in the shadows. Not a lot of pickpockets turned up for a black benefit, but I knew better than to ignore the silent streets.

  I saw no one. The synagogue’s stained-glass walls and street-level glass reflected the lights, the car, and nothing else.

  Laura slipped out of my grasp. She pulled her keys out of her purse, brushed an escaping strand of blond hair away from her face, and walked toward the driver’s side.

  She unlocked her door, and peered at me over the car’s dark blue roof. Her makeup hollowed out her cheeks, giving her a patrician air.

  “You’re angry at me, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied and jiggled the car handle. I wanted to go home.

  She pulled her door open and got inside. She braced an arm on the gearshift between the seats and leaned over, reaching for the lock. In the passenger-side window glass, my own image was superimposed over hers, and I looked as out of place as I felt—a burly, six-foot-tall man stuffed into a suit. The new scar I had along the left side of my face made me seem tougher than I felt. If it weren’t for the topcoat, people would think I was a bouncer at a trendy night club.

  Laura’s fingers pulled lightly on the lock, clicking it open. I grabbed the door handle and pulled as she sat up, sticking the keys in the ignition. I slid inside.

  The car’s interior was warmer than the street had been, even though the leather seats still creaked with the cold. The solid metal frame blocked the wind. We weren’t even rocking from its force.

  I settled back, my knees bent under the dash. It felt awkward to sit on the passenger side, even though the car was hers. I was used to driving.

  But Laura had insisted, just like she had insisted on everything else about this night. She had bought the tickets, helped me find the suit, and even managed to check the official guest list to make sure that there would be no one in attendance that I would have to avoid.

  She had known that Easter was going to be a difficult holiday for all of us, and she had planned this to cheer me up.

  Last Easter, I had been driving back roads with Jimmy Bailey, trying to keep him away from the FBI and the Memphis police. Jimmy had witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the shooter Jimmy had seen was not James Earl Ray. Jimmy, who had been only ten at the time, had reported the shooting to the large contingent of police officers nearby and they had tried to kidnap him on the spot.

  If I hadn’t arrived at just that moment, I have no doubt that Jimmy would be dead now.

  We were hiding here in Chicago. No one except Laura, and Franklin and Althea Grimshaw, knew Jimmy’s name was James Bailey or mine was Smokey Dalton. No one knew that Jimmy and I weren’t blood kin. Everyone here thought we were related to Franklin, and I had identification in my wallet, claiming my name was William S. Grimshaw—a man with an eleven-year-old son named Jimmy.

  I had focused most of my energies these past few weeks on Jimmy. The articles in the papers about King’s assassination, the constant reminders on the television set, had made Jimmy’s nightmares return. I had hoped the actual anniversary of King’s death—which had been, ironically, Good Friday—would make the nightmares go away.

  But they hadn’t.

  So I had agreed to let him spend Easter weekend with the Grimshaws’, hoping that the celebratory church services, the Black Easter parade, and Althea’s delightful Easter dinner would help Jimmy focus on the present, rather than the darkness in his past.<
br />
  It also gave me time with Laura, time we badly needed. In January of this year, we had resumed the relationship we began in Memphis, and it was proving as difficult as I had thought it would be. I was working with Laura now on a per-job basis, inspecting the buildings owned by the company she now ran. Laura had an amazing streak of somewhat naïve color-blindness, but no one else in Sturdy Investments did. The fact that she and I had an equal partnership disturbed almost everyone we came into contact with.

  Then there was the personal relationship, which we were having trouble finding time for. I had Jimmy to care for, and Laura worked long hours. Sometimes we went a week without seeing each other, especially since I rarely went into Sturdy’s offices.

  Tomorrow morning I was supposed to pick up Jimmy, along with all of the Grimshaw children, and take them to school, so Laura and I were staying at my place to make the drive easier. I had wanted to spend the entire evening at home, but by the time I realized Laura was making plans, it had been too late.

  Laura knew I longed for the music that had been part of the air in Memphis. My offices there had been on Beale Street, home of the blues, and every bar, every restaurant, had some form of music in the evenings. Even though Chicago was also a big blues town, it had its own style—a darker, moodier, more urban style that wasn’t as accessible to me. The westside clubs were far away from my home and office, and I wasn’t as free to go out at night as I had been in Memphis.

  But I didn’t want to go to a benefit. I had never liked the pretentiousness of the events, always wondering why people needed a special reward to give to charity.

  I hadn’t told Laura that, but she had sensed my mood on the way over. We pretended we were enjoying the evening, until we got up to dance. Then I felt the tension in Laura’s body. She hadn’t put her head on my shoulder like she had in the past. Instead, she had watched everyone around us, probably feeling the hostility they were directing at her.

  She hadn’t realized when she bought the tickets that she would be crashing an affair designed for blacks only. And I hadn’t prepared her for the cattiness she would be suffering because she was a white woman who was clearly involved with a black man.

  “It seems like you’re mad at me,” Laura said, obviously not willing to let the topic go. She checked the car’s mirrors and turned on her lights before pulling into Clark.

  I was annoyed at the entire evening; I didn’t like small talk and I had been subjected to hours of it. I had also been on alert for the first hour, making certain that no one who might have known me from Memphis, someone who hadn’t been on the initial guest list, was in the room.

  “I would have thought after my donation that people would have understood how serious I am.” She kept her gaze on the road ahead, her hands in a perfect driver’s V on the wheel.

  In the middle of the evening, the organizers called for donations. People verbally pledged an amount, and most wrote checks to cover it right away. Laura had done so, and the hostility had grown worse.

  I had no idea if she had noticed, however. I wasn’t going to tell her. But I didn’t know how to respond to her statement without patronizing her or starting a real fight.

  Laura and I came from completely different worlds. She had been raised the wealthy daughter of a small-time crook who became a self-made businessman. She had been pampered and protected her entire life, stepping out of that world only after her mother had died, when a strange clause in her mother’s will had led her to me.

  My parents had been lynched when I was ten, and after that, I was sent away from everything I knew. My adoptive parents were good people, and they raised me well, but they could never erase the memories I held of my first ten years or of that time I spent hiding in an upstairs closet while my real parents were being dragged out of the house to their deaths.

  “I understand that some people there found my question offensive,” Laura said. “But I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, if we’re going to be a truly integrated society—”

  “It was offensive, Laura,” I said.

  She looked at me. The dim light of the dash revealed the shock on her face. She hadn’t expected me to side against her.

  But she hadn’t understood the situation. Even after listening to the speeches, the points apparently hadn’t struck home. I had no idea how she had missed the evening’s subtext, since the first speaker had outlined it with one sentence:

  If we are really serious about black pride, if we really believe that black is beautiful, if we really believe that we are somebody, we black adults will do something about the adoption of black babies in Chicago.

  Apparently Laura hadn’t heard the phrase “black adults,” or if she had, she had misunderstood it. I had a good view of her as I watched the speakers, and her eyes teared up more than once at the thought of over a thousand children who were unclaimed because of the color of their skin.

  She had stood, hand up, during the question-and-answer section of the presentation, and waited a long time to be called on. I tried to get her to sit, but she shook me off. When the speaker finally turned his attention to her, Laura asked why no one had thought of finding white families to adopt black children.

  The silence in the large restaurant had been deafening. For a moment, I had thought the speaker wasn’t going to answer her. Then he had said, “It simply isn’t feasible,” and had moved onto the next question, leaving Laura red-faced.

  She had sat back down and, to her credit, hadn’t brought up the issue again the entire night. Until now.

  “What did I say that was so wrong?” she asked.

  I didn’t want to have this discussion. I had imagined leaving Sherman House, driving to my apartment, and taking her in my arms. The last thing I wanted was tension between us.

  I sighed. Laura wasn’t going to let me brush her off the way the speaker had.

  I said, “Let’s leave out the fact that a hundred years ago, white people controlled the destinies of blacks and their children, often separating them and selling the children like cattle. Let’s also forget that the social services available to whites, like maternity homes and other such places, are not usually available to blacks. And let’s not even discuss the way the legal system treats black families who somehow find themselves in court. Let’s just talk about what you suggested.”

  “Okay.” Her tone was cautious, like Jimmy’s often was when he knew he was about to get a lecture for something he didn’t completely understand.

  She turned the car onto Lake Shore Drive. Lake Michigan looked black against the night sky. Only the headlights, rippling in the water, gave any indication that the lake was there.

  “If we allow white families to take black children, then we must assume that black families will take white children,” I said.

  “They won’t?” she asked.

  “They won’t be allowed to,” I said. “But that’s not even the point. The point is that our children will leave our culture and our nest, and once again, white people will be determining our future.”

  “But the black children aren’t being adopted,” Laura said. “No one’s taking them. I listened, just like you did.”

  “And there were some things we all knew but which weren’t spelled out for people outside of the community,” I said.

  “Like what?” She kept her gaze trained on the road, but her jaw was set. She was angry too.

  Cars passed us. The street was busier than I would have expected at 10:30 on Easter Sunday.

  “Black families do adopt black children, but have a tougher road of it,” I said. “The model for a stable family is white. The woman is a homemaker and the man is the breadwinner, which is not the norm in black families. In black families, both parents work, and right there that makes the court assume that the household is unfit. If by chance the woman does stay home, then the white inspectors come and judge everything by their standards. They assume the neighborhood is bad because of the preponderance of blacks—”

  “That’s r
idiculous,” Laura said.

  “I don’t care if it’s ridiculous, Laura,” I said. “It happens. When I lived in Memphis, I used to do investigative work for attorneys who sometimes handled adoption petitions. More than once I had to prove that a black neighborhood, which looked dangerous to a white inspector, was actually safer than its economic counterpart in the white community.”

  Laura sighed. “So my donation made it seem like I was patronizing everyone there, then.”

  She finally understood. But I didn’t want to upset her further, so all I said was, “I’m sure they knew you were sincerely trying to help.”

  “One thousand children without a place to go.” Her voice was quiet. “That’s a crime all by itself.”

  “I know.”

  We were heading into Hyde Park now, getting close to my street.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted this to be a pleasant evening, Smokey.”

  I placed my hand on top of the one she had resting on the gearshift. Her skin was warm and soft.

  “It was pleasant,” I said, and it wasn’t a complete lie. “It was fun to hear Ella again, and dancing with you—”

  “Again?” Laura looked at me. She had chewed the lipstick off her lower lip, and more strands of hair had fallen around her face.

  “I saw Ella a few times in Memphis.”

  Laura’s carefully plucked eyebrows rose. I recognized the look. It was a combination of fear and panic.

  “Does she know you?” Laura asked. “Could she have recognized you?”

  I smiled. “Only as a familiar face in the crowd. We never spoke. I was just another nameless fan bebopping to the music.”

  “Bebopping.” Laura smiled, too, and returned her gaze to the road. “I can’t quite imagine you doing that.”

  Maybe not any more. I hadn’t had the lightness and relaxation I had enjoyed on those nights in Memphis for more than a year.

  Laura had never seen me comfortable or lighthearted. From the moment I met her, I had been on guard, and then events conspired to make me serious, protective, and justifiably paranoid.