by Lewis Shiner
“Wow,” Michael said. He sat on the couch and read the letter again. Then he put it in the envelope and handed it to Mercy.
The thing that surprised him most was not the letter itself. The thing that surprised him was that after all the feelings that the letter gave him, the strongest was a sad and grudging amazement at Ruth’s determination. She truly did, Michael thought, love my father.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” Mercy said. “But things had been hard between your father and me for months by that time. When he didn’t show up on Monday, or call, and the sun went down and it got later and later, I despaired. I couldn’t call him at his house, couldn’t go over there to talk to him. It showed me what my position was. I didn’t truly believe he had told Ruth that he was finished with me. On the other hand, if he couldn’t make up his mind to choose me over her, then I was going to make his mind up for him.”
“And what about me?” Michael tried to say. His chest was constricted and the words didn’t make it out.
“What?”
He cleared his throat. “Did you even think about me?”
She knelt on the floor in front of him. “I never thought Ruth would take you. I mean, because of your heritage, if nothing else. I assumed they would put you up for adoption, and I had people ready to get you out of the foster care system and smuggle you back to me. I couldn't believe it when Ruth took you and kept you.
“I went to a lawyer I thought I could trust, and told him I was ready to come out of hiding and go to court to get you back. He said there was no way they would let me have you after what I'd done. I even followed you to Dallas. For a while I would watch your house.
“Then one Sunday I saw the three of you out in the yard. It was January and it had snowed. You were all wrapped up in blankets, sitting in a stroller, and your father was making a little city out of snow for you, and you were laughing, and Ruth was laughing, and I saw that you lived in that city now, and I had no power to take you away from it. And that was when I went to Haiti.”
Michael understood then, in the space after her words, that he had been hoping for an absolute. A blood tie so powerful and unconditional that forgiveness was not a decision but a given. And with that he realized that a bond like that would never exist for him. Maybe it had never existed for anyone. He saw that forgiveness was a choice, and unless it was a choice it meant nothing at all.
Slowly, not without physical pain of his own, he got down off the couch and knelt beside her. He saw hurt, resignation, hope, fear, and love in her eyes. He put his arms around her and rested his battered head on her shoulder and said, “You have me now.”
Thursday, November 25
The week before Thanksgiving, he and Denise and Rachid flew one-way to Austin and began to pack his house. His friends came to help and made a considerable fuss over Denise. It took them two days to load the U-Haul, followed by a two-day drive to Durham on the southern route: I-10 to Slidell, I-59 north to Birmingham, then across to Atlanta to pick up I-85. Rachid alternated between Denise in Michael’s Honda Civic and Michael in the truck.
Michael had rented a two-bedroom apartment three doors down from Denise. It gave her breathing space yet let them be together every night. The light was good enough in the smaller bedroom for Michael to use it as a studio. He had other plans for the second one.
Mercy didn’t have a phone or car, but she responded to email. He marshaled his strongest arguments and convinced her to stay in his apartment over Thanksgiving, and into the New Year if she’d be willing.
He and Denise drove to Bentonville on Thanksgiving Day to pick her up. She had one suitcase, her laptop, and a small box of books.
“I was hoping you would stay for a while,” Michael said.
“I travel light.”
Once in the car she said, “I still have my doubts about this. All my life, I’ve carried my own weight.”
Michael pulled onto the highway. “Don’t worry. I expect you to earn your keep.”
“I don’t do windows,” she said, and then, almost as an afterthought, “as the submarine captain said.” Michael looked in the rearview mirror. She was half-smiling at herself, and for the first time Michael saw clearly the woman his father had loved.
“That’s not what I had in mind,” he said. “I want you to sit for a portrait.”
*
Mercy was the first, and Camilla Prentiss, her former neighbor on Beamon Street, was the second. He took a handful of reference photos of her, and lit the painting as a night scene, with Hayti’s Donut Shop in faded greens and blues behind her.
He’d chosen to paint in oils rather than acrylics. He loved the smell of the paint and the linseed oil and the ongoing struggle to control the texture of the surface.
To cover the rent, he was drawing a fill-in issue of Detective Comics by a Seattle writer named Ed Brubaker. The idea made Michael nervous at first, but the script was first-rate, the editor was excited to have him, and based on his first eight pages they’d promised him all the work he wanted.
Best of all, it left half his days free to paint.
Sunday, November 28
The Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, Michael went to his car for a run to Harris Teeter. Someone came toward him as he put his keys in the car door and he spun around, adrenalin pumping.
It was Charles.
“Hey,” Charles said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking. Part of it was the lingering threat of the NRC, part of it something deeper that had gone into the heart of him.
“I was sitting here,” Charles said, “trying to decide if I should come up and bother you. Donald let on that you were living with Denise now.”
“I didn’t think you two were talking.” Charles looked thinner, but otherwise in good shape. He wore loose jeans, a pale blue UNC sweatshirt, and a Yankees baseball cap.
“I’ve been saying my goodbyes, and he was on the list.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m heading up to Philly for a while. Some of the brothers up there got a group going that’s more my style.”
“I’m sorry it fell out that way. I wish I’d had a chance to know you better.”
“Yeah, me too. Life during wartime, you know?”
Michael offered his hand. “Good luck with it.”
Charles drew him into a hug. “Yeah, man. You be reading about us in the paper. We going to make some noise.”
“Make some for me.”
“And you?” Charles said. “You heal up all right?”
“More or less,” Michael said.
“I got to run,” Charles said. “You can tell Donald I’m gone.” He took a few steps and turned back. “We faced those motherfuckers down. That was a day, little brother. Never forget it.”
Michael held up one hand as Charles got into a battered Toyota pickup and drove away.
Tuesday, December 21
With Mercy there, Donald Harriman became a frequent visitor. Two or three nights a week they would all have dinner together, and then afterward, when Rachid retired to do his homework, they would sit in Michael’s living room and talk.
The American Tobacco riot still made headlines. Greg Vaughan’s high-dollar defense lawyer had bombarded the court with motions that claimed everything from police brutality to lack of evidence to crime scene tampering to entrapment. Bishop had kept his word and continued to push for a ban on the NRC, both locally and nationally. It looked to be a long, bitter fight.
On a Tuesday in mid-December the Durham Herald-Sun “reluctantly” came out in favor of the NRC, calling it a “First Amendment issue.”
“I can’t stand reading this,” Michael said to Harriman and the others that night. “What are you supposed to do? Where do you start?” He was thinking of Charles, tirelessly moving from one battle to the next, nothing ever changing.
“I went to an academic conference a while ago and Howard Fuller wa
s there,” Harriman said. “He’s up in Wisconsin now, teaching at Marquette. Somebody in the audience said essentially the same thing you just did, and Fuller, God bless him, asked if he were talking about reform or revolution. And then he said, ‘Reform is just learning how to accommodate repression.’ When I talked to him afterward, though, he admitted that the Revolution is not going to happen, not in this country, not in our lifetimes.”
“Then what’s the point?” Michael said. “New Rising Sun, the tattoos, the demonstrations—why bother?”
“It’s a question I ask myself every day,” Harriman said. “The only answer I have is that you have to take sides and you have to show the world that you mean it. You do whatever you can, not because of what you hope to accomplish, but because to do anything else is ultimately…not acceptable.”
Harriman got up to leave shortly after that, and while they were all standing at the door, Denise said, “I’ve got an early day tomorrow.”
Michael kissed her and said, “I’ll be along in a minute.”
He sat on the couch next to Mercy and she said, “You know when you’ve been to the dentist, and the anesthetic starts to wear off? Your face is tingling, and there’s this hollow feeling, like any minute the real pain could come flooding in?”
Michael nodded, and she went on, “I feel like I’m thawing out now, and I’m scared what it’s going to feel like when it’s done. I’ve been a long time gone, and there’s a lot of chickens going to be coming home to roost.” She picked up her wineglass and took a sip, seeming to drift away.
“Don’t stop,” Michael said. “Keep talking.”
She thought for a second and said, “When you try to put words to it, what I did was, I faked my own death. But it didn’t feel all that fake to me. It was like I died for real, and when I came back, I wasn’t the same person anymore.”
“When the timer went off on that bomb,” Michael said, “I knew absolutely that I was dead. It’s like my life is in two parts, before and after.”
“I used to be a very physical person,” Mercy said. “Hugging and touching and all of that. Afterward, I wasn’t anymore.” Slowly, tentatively, she reached for his hand. “I guess I’m trying to say, I hope you’re not too disappointed in me.”
“Disappointed how?”
“Because I never called you, never called Robert, never took back that awful thing I did. Now you’ve brought me into your home, with Denise and Rachid, who are so wonderful, and I…I’ve barely been here. And now that that’s starting to change, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle it.”
“I’m not disappointed,” Michael said. “I’m still angry and hurt and maybe I won’t ever get entirely over that. But I’m grateful you’re alive and you’re here. I’ll take what I can get. And a lot of the time, I’m not completely here myself.”
“Still not sleeping?”
“One reason I’m sitting here talking to you is I’m afraid to go back there and lie down and close my eyes. I’m still having the headaches. And I feel like I’m getting another cold. Like you predicted.”
“It’s classic post-traumatic stress. You can go get a bunch of tests on your thyroid and cortisol and epinephrine if you want it in writing, and the shrinks can give you some pills with worse side effects than what you’re trying to cure.”
“Have you got something that’ll cure it? Eye of newt or blowfish or something?”
“Baby, I don’t think there is a cure,” Mercy said. “Barrett used to talk about that tattoo of his. You know the one?”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“For him it meant transformation. Rebirth. That’s you and me both, both reborn. And I’m thinking what hurts so bad is that neither one of us has finished the process yet.”
Friday, December 24
He called Ruth on Christmas Eve, after lunch. She was surprised to hear from him and, he thought, grateful. They made small talk for 20 minutes, and Michael promised he would call again. He didn't mention Mercy or Vaughan or his father. Eventually he would have to deal with those questions. For now, one thing at a time was enough.
Friday, December 31
He’d picked the place out of the phone book by the sound of its name: Dogstar Tattoos. They were close by, across from Duke’s East Campus. He’d made an appointment the day before, giving himself time to change his mind. As he’d lain awake thinking about it, a succession of images had come to him: Ruth at the funeral home, staring at Denise’s black skin in incomprehension; the blossom of red on a white-hooded robe as black-armored police looked on; Mercy in a white porcelain bathtub full of blood. He knew then that he would go through with it.
He was not alone at the crossroads. Mercy was meeting with Duke Medical Center about starting a research program of her own. And Denise had come home the Tuesday after Christmas and surprised him with a final divorce decree. “Not a hint for you to propose,” she said, “just something I should have taken care of long ago.”
He understood that it was now, on this last day of the year, his turn.
The place had a sleek look: chrome, mirrors, glass bricks. He hesitated outside the door, but only for a second.
“My name’s Cooper,” he told a woman standing near the door. She had pink hair and seven rings in one ear. “I had an appointment for three o’clock.”
“Sure. What can we help you with?”
He unfolded a piece of paper with a drawing of the Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun. “I want to get this on my left wrist. I want it to look like the old-fashioned tattoos, just the lines, nothing fancy.”
“Sure,” she said. “Jason can help you.” She pointed to a pale man with long, unnaturally black hair, straightening up his tools on a metal tray. He stood next to an antique barber’s chair.
“Are you Jason?” he asked, walking over.
“That’s me.”
“Hi,” he said, taking a breath, and then saying the words for the first time, “I’m Malcolm.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was just a kid, and I was sitting in the car with my Uncle Bob and various other relatives, driving across the flat plains of Kansas on one of the first superhighways in America. Uncle Bob was a highway engineer, and I will always remember him pointing to a concrete embankment as we roared by.
“You wouldn’t believe,” he said, “how many bodies are buried in those things.”
*
When I decided to try to tell the story of Hayti as a novel, I knew I was making a tradeoff. I would knowingly be playing fast and loose with some of the facts in the hope of getting at a higher truth. I didn’t go lightly into the bargain, and one of the conditions I made myself was that I would try to untangle the facts and fiction in an afterword.
Hayti, of course, was real, as was the urban renewal program of the 1960s. The only business I invented for this novel is the Hamilton Nursery. Descriptions of the rest of the Hayti landmarks are as accurate as I could make them.
The firebombings of the Carolina Times and Service Printing are unfortunately true. They remain unsolved, and likely to stay that way.
The East-West Expressway, now known as the Durham Freeway and NC 147, was actually built by a number of contractors; the first stretch, described in this novel, was built by the William Muirhead Construction Company; consulting engineers were Rummel Klepper and Kahl, LLP. No resemblance exists between these companies and my fictional firm of Mason and Antree.
I drew on press releases and press coverage of the first IBM location in RTP, but used my own construction experience when describing the details of the IBM job site and the events there.
There is no Black Star Corporation in Durham. The American Tobacco Campus is as I described it, but Capital Broadcasting of Raleigh operates it. They have made no connection between its restoration and the fate of Hayti.
The Night Riders of the Confederacy are my invention, but the hate groups I modeled them on, sadly, are not. The Ku Klux Klan is only one of many white supremacist groups active in the Sou
thern US.
On that note, let me point out that I used the term “rebel flag” throughout this book advisedly. There were many Confederate flags; the one Southern racists fly today descends from two historical flags, combining the proportions of the Naval Jack (which had a sky-blue cross) and the colors of the Battle Flag (which was actually square).
Barrett Howard is a fictional character inspired by two heroes of the North Carolina Civil Rights movement, Robert F. Williams and Howard Fuller. Timothy B. Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie is a superb biography of Williams; Fuller’s has yet to be written, though he gets extensive coverage in Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina, by Christina Greene. Barrett Howard’s involvement with vodou and commitment to armed insurrection are entirely his own. Both Williams and Fuller survived the sixties, though for Williams it was a near thing and he had to leave the US to do it.
Denise Franklin is fictional, but her predecessor at the Hayti Heritage Center, the late Dorothy Phelps-Jones, was not. Ms. Jones was a great help to me in the early stages of this book—frank, thoughtful, and generous. Her spirit will not be forgotten.
*
Many other people gave selflessly of their time, expertise, and resources to help me get as much right as possible. Errors of fact and judgment that remain are entirely my own.
My profound thanks to: Dr. Howard Fuller, still angry, still funny, and still fighting; Dr. John D. Butts, Chief Medical Examiner of the State of North Carolina, for his experience, kindness, and good humor; Sgt. Brett P. Hallan, then head of the Homicide Division of the Durham Police Department; Terence Hamill of GeoSearches, Inc., geophysicist and GPR professional; Phil Watts of the North Carolina Department of Transportation; Nancy Buttry Sparrow, Funeral Director at Hall-Wynne Funeral Home; Christy Sandy, senior staffer at the US House of Representatives; Jack Wolf, MD; Cory Annis, MD; and most especially Claire Dees, MD, who made time to share her oncology expertise amid the chaos of a new baby.