by Randy Alcorn
So just as he was looking for a job came the rush to correct the imbalance. Newspapers tripped over each other to show who was the least racist. Affirmative action policies were implemented everywhere. Recruiters swarmed J-schools, searching for blacks. To Clarence it seemed a great opportunity. Still, the minority hiring frenzy made him feel as if he was being put out on the auction block, like his ancestors. He knew he was highly qualified—he’d worked hard and he was good. But he had the unsettling impression some newspapers would have hired him even if he wasn’t. If you were black, could tell time, and speak an intelligible sentence, it was as though you’d overcome some genetic flaw and already exceeded the highest expectations of whites.
He remembered overhearing a white reporter say, “Yeah, Abernathy’s okay for a quota boy.” He knew he’d earned his job, but the affirmative action that helped some people get jobs also perpetuated the myth it was impossible for blacks to win jobs unless things got tilted their way. It troubled him then, and it troubled him now.
The Oregon Journal wined and dined him, especially fortyish and independently wealthy Raylon Berkley, who after the merger—by one of those strange quirks of business—had become a VP, CEO, and finally the publisher of the Trib. Berkley himself took Clarence to a Portland restaurant where he was one of three blacks, the other two busboys. It was far and away the fanciest dinner he’d ever had. That unforgettable evening Berkley made his big offer, and a few days later Clarence signed with the Journal.
When he got his first paycheck it embarrassed him. It was so much money, much more than his daddy had ever made, over twice as much as his janitorial job. For a while he felt the token black, which was its own kind of slavery without the whippings. He learned that editors could lash out verbal beatings, but they did it to whites too. In time, he fit in, at least on the outside.
Looking back now, Clarence felt guilty he’d ever compared his experiences of racism to those of his ancestors. He felt he’d cheapened their ordeals, trivialized their sufferings when his were so much less. While he’d heard black people didn’t have many opportunities, his experience in the workplace suggested otherwise. This was the beginning of his gradual fifteen-year swing from moderate liberalism to die-hard conservatism.
At a family gathering eighteen years ago, hearing he was going to work for a newspaper, one cousin warned him, “Stay black, man.”
He’d thought about that exhortation often. If black was just a skin color, how could he not stay black? He knew the real message. Only white people succeed in America. If a black man succeeds, it means you’re a porch nigger, an Uncle Tom, a traitor. The cousin who’d told him to stay black had deserted his wife and children, sold dope, and gone to the pen for armed robbery and grand theft auto. Yet Clarence imagined his cousin probably still took pride in thinking he’d “stayed black.”
Clarence was no more comfortable with racial applause than with criticism. In North Portland, some people would read his columns and talk about them in diners and say to his parents or to him, “We’re so proud of you.” It was as if every column, every accomplishment struck a blow for equal rights, as if he were the Martin Luther King Jr. of the sports department. He was a success story, and it felt good. But something about it bothered him, as if any young black man off drugs and working and not knocking off a 7-Eleven was a regular Frederick Douglass.
I’m just a reporter, for crying out loud. Don’t lay the world on my shoulders.
Still, he told himself something he’d heard many years ago. “Your reputation is all you have.” Clarence Abernathy had worked painstakingly to build that reputation. He would never let it slide.
Clarence sat downstairs in the family room, turning upside down the front page of the Trib, not wanting to see again the two pictures of Norcoast, one at the rally, the other at the hospital.
He relaxed in his ancient recliner, stuffing oozing out the breaks in the brown Naugahyde. Geneva had wanted to toss it ten years ago when they moved in, but in a compromise it was demoted to the basement. As he sat back to experience the chair’s friendliness, he smelled something familiar, something sweet, like the residual of an old perfume. He turned around. Right above him was the stitchery his mother had done for him fourteen years ago, a millennial scene with lion and lamb lying down together. Under it was the caption from Isaiah, “And the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of God, as the earth covers the sea.”
She’d worked on it for a year, finishing it not long before she died. Her hands and her heart had gone into it, and the countless hours had immersed it with her comforting fragrance. But the smell disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen. It was so elusive. He would never forget his mother, of course, but many of the details had been eclipsed by the passing of time, and that bothered him. He wanted to hug her again, look at that old cracked black skin, that beautiful skin that was now more of an impression than the sharp image it used to be.
It was even worse with his brother Darrin. It had been twenty-seven years since he’d died in Vietnam. He didn’t seem real to Clarence anymore. He’d become an almost mythical figure, someone you sometimes talked about but who wasn’t real, like Spiderman. He was no more than a bunch of old black-and-white pictures now, and the whole didn’t seem any more than the sum of the parts.
He wondered about Dani. Even the features of her face once engraved so clearly in his memory seemed to be blurring in this, just the sixteenth day without her. He’d looked yesterday at picture after picture of her, but the soft contours of her face weren’t there. Neither was the warmth of her touch.
First Darrin, then his mother, now his sister. All lost to him. And yet, even as he brooded silently, he had the odd feeling that something was going on beyond him, as if he, not those who were gone, was the odd man out. As if there was a party and he hadn’t been invited. Or perhaps he’d been invited, but he’d have to show up late, after work. In any case, he felt left out, terribly left out.
His thoughts piled up as kindling in which a flame suddenly emerged.
She always talked about you, always put you first. And this is how you repay her? By having her blown away by gangsters? I wonder what she thinks of all those promises now.
Clarence twisted his big body into a semi-fetal position on the recliner, crying out to someone he wasn’t sure was listening. He spoke out loud in case it might help.
“You took my brother and you killed him in a rice paddy. You took my mama with a cancer you could have stopped. And now you took my sister and shot her up, killed her like she was nothing. And you expect me just to forget it, to pretend it’s okay? Well, it isn’t!”
He sat quietly for a moment. Then he added, “If you’re really there, you’ve got to save Felicia. You’ve got to.”
Clarence went out on a drive to no place in particular. He stopped at the Leathers gas station, just two miles from his house. He thought about the triple murder here that had rocked the community, and the double murder a week later, just up the street on Kane. It was three years ago now. Several times the nineteen-year-old killer had been featured again on America’s Most Wanted. The station served as an enduring symbol of loss of innocence in the suburbs, the story of a quiet beautiful place invaded by the kind of crime people hoped to forever leave behind when they abandoned the big city.
Tragedy has no suburbs.
He thought about local high schoolers who’d died in drunk driving accidents, children run over on the streets, kids who killed their friends playing with guns, the local high school valedictorian who died from hypothermia in a river, freaked out on LSD. Suicides, scandals, child abuse, and now gangs had come to Gresham. No place seemed immune anymore. The contamination of the suburbs was the death of a dream.
Clarence was just glad that soon they’d be moving farther out. He was expecting a call from the real estate agent that night.
Better get home.
“You signed on the dotted line.” The real estate agent sounded adamant. “You’ve still got to move
out by September 30. It’s that simple.”
“Simple for you. You don’t have to move when there’s no place to go!”
“Look, I’m sorry the Langley’s deal fell through. But when you put down the earnest money the contract said you couldn’t move in until they move out. They have until the end of the year.”
“But they said they’d be out by September 22.”
“I know, but what they said doesn’t matter. The contract you signed is all that matters. That gives them until December 31. My guess is they won’t be out till Thanksgiving, maybe not till Christmas.”
“Two and a half months? Three and a half? What am I supposed to do?”
“Rent some place. Hard to do for a couple months, granted. A decent rental house in Gresham or Sandy doesn’t come cheap. Sorry. If you’d had a disaster, your insurance would cover it, but—”
“It is a disaster.”
“Any family you can live with?”
“No.” Clarence put down the phone in disgust, sighing the heavy sighs that had become second nature in the last two weeks. Geneva walked in.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What we were afraid of. The Langley’s deal fell through. We can’t get into the house until the end of November.”
“But we have to move out. What are we going to do?”
“Don’t know,” Clarence said. “Should have done the contracts differently. I knew it was a mistake.”
“Can we find a rental?”
“That’ll be tough. With the new car payments and everything else, this isn’t a good time. There’s not that much in savings. I’m just not sure we can afford this.”
“Harley and Sophie would let us stay with them.”
“No way Not Harley. We’d kill each other off like two pit bulls with rabies. Of course, then you could use the life insurance money to get a place for you and the kids.”
“Very funny,” Geneva said. “Where will we go? With your daddy and Ty and Celeste there’s seven of us.”
“I can count.”
“Well,” she said it gently, “there’s always Mama or my sisters.”
“You think I’m going to listen to all their talk about what bums black men are and how it’s a good thing black women know how to run the show?”
“Clarence, that’s not fair.”
“May I quote your mother? ‘It’s the rooster that crows, but it’s the hen that delivers the goods.’”
“Okay, they’ve all three had some bad experiences with men who just wanted to jive around all day and sleep in and do drugs and make babies.”
“Yeah. And black women just want money and jewelry and to take charge of the universe. Right?”
“I wasn’t agreeing with the stereotype, Clarence! I was just explaining how they feel.”
“Making excuses for them, that’s what you’re doing.”
“Okay,” Geneva said, her hands in the air, “now that you’ve ruled out every option, where’s a place we can live for the next few months? I can’t tell you anything, that’s for sure. How about you tell me?”
Geneva sat quietly and looked at him.
“No.” Clarence said finally. “We’re not going to Dani’s.”
“I didn’t say anything.” She raised her hands again.
“You didn’t have to. I know what you’re thinking.”
“So what are you thinking? What’s the alternative?”
“I’ll come up with something.” Clarence groaned.
“This isn’t easy for me either,” Geneva said. “But we’ve had three neighbors robbed in the last six months. It’s not like it’s completely safe out here either. I don’t want to drive our kids to school both ways every day. But we’ve both got family that have lived in city neighborhoods all these years, and Dani and Felicia were the first ones to get hurt bad. Come on. Living in the inner city isn’t like living on the moon.”
“No, it’s not,” Clarence said. “If it was the moon, I’d say let’s go.”
“Think about it,” Geneva said. “We’ve decided to take in Dani’s kids. The psychologist says they’d benefit from staying in the same school, same routine. Meanwhile, we can’t stay here, and there’s no place else to go. Dani’s house is just sitting there. Looks to me like God’s providing it for us.”
“Jake said if this happened we could move in with him,” Clarence said.
“Okay. Fine. Eight people in Jake’s two-bedroom apartment. No problem. You and I and Jake and Daddy could share one room. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?” She gave a half smile, calling his bluff.
Clarence knew she knew he wouldn’t stoop to mooching off someone. It was irritating living with someone who knew him so well.
“It’s only two or three months, Clarence. We’ve got to do something.” She walked out of the room.
Without looking up, closing his eyes, or opening his mouth, he talked to someone with a great deal of experience being blamed.
You take my sister, Felicia’s struggling for her life, and now you take my house out from under me? I’ve got to find a roof over our head, like some homeless person or something? Well, thank you, Lord. Anything else you want to do to show how much you care? If this is love, do me a favor and don’t start hating me!
A rush of sound and fury awakened her, and she felt a panicked fear for the safety of her daughters. But in the next moment, Dani Rawls awoke again, this time not to a scene of agonized confusion but to a glowing quiet passageway. Behind her lay a land of shadows, a gray and colorless two-dimensional flatland. Ahead of her lay…something that defied description.
The departure point stood in stark contrast to the destination, a fresh and utterly captivating place, resonating with color and beauty. She could not only see and hear it, but feel and smell and taste it, even from a distance. The light beckoned her to come dive into it, with abandon, as cool water beckons on a blistering August afternoon.
“Wow!”
She sensed intuitively this place she moved toward was the Substance that cast the shadows in the other world. If that place was midnight, this was sunrise. Up ahead was the twelve-dimensional reality of which the two-dimensional flatland had been but a replica. A very poor replica, Dani thought, the closer she got to the real thing.
“It’s fabulous. Incredible.”
Though she had not yet stepped foot on it, already everything within her told her this was the Place that defined all places, the Place by which all places must be judged. It was the prototype, the master from which all copies were made. The place reached out to Dani, playfully grabbing at her, drawing her soul as a powerful magnet draws iron filings.
“The colors. So many colors!”
The transition reminded her of the Wizard of Oz, where the film goes from black and white to color. But this was millions upon millions of colors. In comparison to this, all the colors of earth she’d enjoyed so much had been no more than shades of gray. Now there was an infinite rainbow of colors, reaching as far beyond earth’s rainbow as sunlight beyond a match flame.
“I’m getting stronger. I can feel it.”
Only moments ago she’d been so weary, bone tired, the way she’d felt many nights caring for her sick children, alone without a husband. Not exactly alone. She’d often clung to the promises of someone invisible to be the Father of the fatherless. She felt now like the bride about to finally embrace the groom.
How was she moving so quickly while still feeling too drained to move? Wait. She was being carried. Carried in giant arms. How could she not have realized it until now?
She turned her head and looked up at a sculptured face, appearing semi-human, semi-marble statue. This giant of a man had a face like she’d never seen. A face chiseled from rock. Quarry stone features. She knew intuitively this was a warrior, a veteran of battles, one who had carried many wounded to safety.
“Don’t know who you are, but you can carry a load, that’s for sure!” She laughed that unbridled laugh, that contagious laugh which had se
rved her so well in the difficult times. Not breaking his stride, Stoneface looked in her eyes and listened intently, the corners of his lips turning up just slightly.
Who was this? She stared at his arms, brawny and strong. The muscles were taut but not bulging, suggesting he wasn’t taxed by her weight, that she was a light burden or that he was used to bearing heavy ones. Maybe like her slave forefathers. She was thankful for his strength and felt her own body infusing with energy.
She remembered her Bible. Lazarus was carried to heaven by angels. Was this an angel sent to carry her home?
He was dark—not quite as dark as she, more like pure-blooded Middle Eastern, a dark skin sun-baked to further darkness. She gazed at her own skin, the same yellow brown as it had been on earth.
Perhaps this wasn’t heaven’s threshold. She’d heard once that in heaven all skin would be the same color. But which color? Actually, she hadn’t pictured skin at all. Maybe heaven would be a giant hanger for skinless spirits. But what she was moving toward wasn’t ghosty; it was solid. Considerably more solid than the world she’d just departed.
The warrior’s size and strength and rock hard features made her shiver involuntarily. He looked away from the far end of the passageway where they were headed and gazed at her. She saw in his eyes both resolute purpose and kindness. She could almost see the rock crack and a little dust fly off as a slightly unnatural grin broke across that marbly face.
“Hello, Dani.”
“Well, hello to you, tall, dark, and handsome. You gonna tell me what’s goin’ on here?”
He smiled again, like one who hasn’t smiled often but enjoys it when he does.
“Who are you?” she asked. “An angel sent to get me?”
“Not sent to get you. Beckoned to take you. I’ve been with you all along. We’re both going home.”