by Gwen Florio
Her grandfather, Nora thought, would never have ma’amed Grace Evans.
And yet, after her brother was shot, she not only stayed in Chateau but returned to work in Quail House.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Nora murmured.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ someone said behind her. ‘Not one damn bit of it.’
Nora jerked in her seat, nearly upsetting the go-cup of coffee she’d smuggled into the library, knowing that discovery would have resulted in permanent banishment by Emily Beattie. She turned and stared up into eyes as nearly as green as her own.
The man standing behind her chair wore a linen suit of charcoal gray. It looked hot despite the light fabric. The gray at his temples, the faint etchings at the corners of his eyes and from mouth to chin, those gentle scratches of time destined to become deep gouges, told her they’d been born in the same decade. He apologized in a voice that rumbled at the lower depths of basso, his words so perfunctory that he didn’t sound sorry at all.
‘Kwame Evans,’ he introduced himself.
Maybe, she thought, there was another Kwame Evans. His next words wrecked her foolish fantasy.
‘Robert’s father. Bobby’s and Grace’s little brother.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She could see it now. He had the same broad forehead and wide eyes that gave his face a frank, open look. She remembered her manners.
‘Nora Best.’ She started to hold out her hand but jerked it back when he didn’t respond.
‘I know who you are.’
Of course he did. Killer Cop Has a Side Piece.
He cut his eyes toward the screen and arched an eyebrow. An accusing headline looked back at both of them.
Community Demands Answers. With a black-bordered photo of his older brother.
Nora felt as though she’d been caught in the act of … what, exactly? Whatever it was, there was no hiding it.
‘I didn’t know about it,’ she said. ‘Your sister – I’ve known her ever since I was a little girl. I never knew she’d lost a brother.’
‘Lost. That implies she could find him if she just looked hard enough.’
Touché. She nodded acknowledgment and tried again. ‘I never knew she’d had a brother who’d been killed. And all the things that happened here, the demonstrations, the riot, the National Guard. And my grandfather – he was right in the middle of all of it. I feel so … so … stupid.’ There was no other word for it.
‘You are stupid.’
Nora blinked.
His tone was all equanimity, the smooth pleasant aspect of his face unchanged, not a hint of anger or accusation. Just a statement of fact.
Nora came to her own defense of the charge she’d leveled at herself.
‘You could least have allowed as to how I was ignorant, rather than stupid. For one thing, it’s true. And for another, that would have been the nice thing to do.’ She sucked in her breath, as though she could recall the words. Good one, Nora. Lecturing a grieving man on manners.
But he almost smiled.
‘You tell me what’s nice about this. About any of it. Then or now.’
‘You’re right. Not a damn thing. Look, I’m sorry. No matter what I say, it’s coming out wrong. I’m just trying, at this very late date, to remedy my own ignorance. My stupidity. I never even knew about you or your older brother until this happened. Do you mind my asking – what was he like?’
His face softened further still. ‘I don’t mind. I don’t much get a chance to talk about him, especially not about what he was like. All anybody cares about is how he died. But we probably shouldn’t talk here. Miss Emily will have our hides.’
Nora glanced toward the front desk and stifled a laugh. ‘For someone who didn’t grow up here, you’ve managed to learn one of the most important things. Don’t get crosswise with Miss Emily.’
She logged out of the Afro and followed Kwame Evans out of the library, pretending not to notice Emily Beattie’s quivering attention as they passed.
TWENTY-SEVEN
They settled themselves on a bench beneath a spreading maple tree to one side of the library steps, the shade rendering its broad planks bearable. Just.
A white couple walked past them into the library, the woman twisting as they passed, staring at Nora. Not tourists, Nora decided; they didn’t have the sunburnt skin, the salt-stiffened hair, the flagrantly casual clothes – a rip here, a stain there, because it didn’t matter; they were on vacation – but bore the purposeful look of people running regular errands in town. The hardware store, the supermarket, the library. Indeed, the woman cradled an armful of children’s books. Her hair was pulled away from her face into a short ponytail, exposing a large birthmark along her jawline and nearly covering half her neck, like a smear of strawberry jam from a toddler’s sticky hand, and Nora gave her credit for not styling her hair so as to hide it.
She leaned close to her husband and whispered something, and he, too, turned to rake his gaze across Nora. One day, Nora thought, she would get used to her own unwelcome notoriety. She just wasn’t there yet. She was relieved when Kwame spoke.
‘I was only a little boy when Bobby headed back here. I barely remember him. But what I do remember, he was more like a father than a brother, Grace more like a mother; they were both so much older. Our parents, they were really old, at least in my mind. Time I came along, they were past all that child-rearing stuff. So Bobby and Grace mainly took care of me, until Bobby …’ He briefly closed his eyes.
‘Everything changed after that. Grace moved back here. Said she wanted people in town to see her all day, every day, so that nobody could forget Bobby.’
Nobody. An all-encompassing word, but when Grace had returned to Chateau, she’d gone to work for a specific somebody, in the home of the very Police Chief who’d so officiously brushed off her brother’s death as either suicide, a drug deal gone awry, or even murder at the hands of the people he’d come to help – and had stayed on there even after Nora’s grandfather’s death.
‘My parents – the life just went out of them after Bobby was killed. It was like being in a house with a couple of ghosts. Kept the shades drawn all day, barely talked, not even between themselves, let alone to me. They sent me down to stay with Grace every summer. I didn’t find out until later that she was the one who insisted on getting me out of there. Funny, this being the town where Bobby was killed, but those were some of the best times of my life. I liked it so much that my wife and I sent Robert down here each summer for the same reason. He was on his way to visit Grace when …’
He stopped. ‘If we’d never sent him down here, he’d still …’ He stopped again.
Nora fought an impulse to lay a comforting hand on the arm of the man who’d refused to shake her hand.
‘For a long time I was almost as ignorant’ – he put some English on the word, with a wry smile in her direction – ‘as you. It was years before I realized this was where he was killed. Grace kept it from me as long as she could. I think she just wanted to get me out of that sad, dark house. But that’s not what she said. Said she was afraid I’d grow up a city boy, not know how to take care of myself. Showed me how to fish, got me a little twenty-two so I could shoot squirrels and rabbits.’
No, thought Nora, Grace wouldn’t have brought him into the frosty propriety of Quail House. She’d have kept him as far away as possible, urging him into the woods, down to the river, places where he could skin his knees, dirty up his clothes, come home smiling with leaves in his hair and a string of silvery perch dangling from his hand.
‘Fishing, I get,’ she said. ‘But squirrels?’ She made a face. ‘I was always told it’s a sin to shoot something that you don’t intend to eat.’ She didn’t mention it was a lesson imparted by her grandfather, guessing that a reference to the former Police Chief would be unwelcome.
‘Oh, we ate them. She taught me to skin them and dress them and made me help her cook them, too.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Never did learn to like ’em, thou
gh. Well, rabbit. I guess that was OK. It’s the one thing that truly does taste like chicken. But not squirrel. And I told her never, ever to think about bringing me no muskrat. Apparently, Bobby was the same way. Never did develop a taste for it.’
‘Bobby,’ Nora urged. ‘What was he like?’
His laughter eased into something soft and fond. ‘Big.’
‘Big?’
‘I was little. To me, he always looked about ten feet tall. He’d ride me around on his shoulders so that my head would bump the ceiling. He named me, you know.’
Of course she didn’t know. But she held her tongue as he talked on.
‘Way I heard it, he took me right out of my mother’s arms and claimed me for his own. I guess I was like a toy to him, or something. Carried me around everywhere and insisted on giving me this name. For years, I thought it was something special in Swahili – you know, like the Brave One, or Wise Child, or something grand. Turns out it means Saturday. The day I was born.’
A laugh boomed out, so deep and easy that Nora was tempted to relax. But how could she, when she knew how the story ended?
He must have been thinking the same thing, because the laugh ended abruptly. ‘He was already in college when I was born. Morgan State, so at least he lived at home. I’ve tried and tried but I can’t remember him saying anything in particular about the civil rights stuff he was involved in, but then, why would he have talked about it with me? I was barely more than a baby. It was just …’
He stopped. Closed his eyes again.
‘He was there one day and then he wasn’t. And he never was again.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The most inadequate phrase ever invented.
He dusted off his immaculate pants and rose to his feet. ‘Not as sorry as I am. Thanks for letting me talk about my brother. Sorry I interrupted your research. I noticed you were looking at the old-timey stories. Seen any newer ones?’
Nora shook her head. ‘I was just trying to find out what happened back then.’
His lips tightened. ‘You might want to pay attention to what’s happening now.’ He turned to leave, then turned back.
‘We’re marching today. You ought to come. Might help fix that ignorance.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
1967
The Morgan State students – a dozen of them – boarded with black people all over town.
Despite the Evanses’ deep ties in Chateau, it had taken all of Grace and Bobby’s powers of persuasion – weeks of visiting, writing follow-up letters and even a few long-distance phone calls from Baltimore – to find enough people willing to take in strangers coming to town for the express purpose of making life difficult.
Because as bad as things were, they could get worse. People could lose their jobs. Their homes – most black people in Chateau rented. Even their lives. Paranoid? Hardly. Nobody had to mention Medgar Evers, shot on his doorstep in Mississippi just a few weeks earlier. Change was coming, yes, but the cost was terrible. Wasn’t there the slightest chance that Chateau might follow the rest of the world, years later but at least peacefully?
Grace sat at kitchen tables and drank lemonade in tall, cold glasses set before her by shaking hands; tried to catch downcast gazes, listened hard to whispered excuses. ‘I want to, I surely do. But …’
‘We’ll pay our way.’ There’d been a collection on campus, funded by students and professors who wished they could take part, but for various reasons – jobs, families and the equally reasonable one of soul-shaking fear – could not. ‘It’s not much, but it’ll cover the cost of food and a little more for your trouble.’
She’d offered once, afraid of how it might be received, and saw those fears realized.
Of course, it had been taken as an insult. The woman had stiffened. Her trembling hands stilled. ‘Like I’d take money to do the right thing.’
Grace started to apologize, but the woman spoke over her. ‘You send one of those children here. I’ll talk to some other people for you.’
For their part, the members of the group respected the danger they’d posed their hosts, slipping in and out of homes via alleys and back doors, heading off to early-morning organizing meetings at AME Zion clutching paper sacks packed with sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and a piece of fruit picked from a backyard tree, often sent on their way with a hug and a ‘God bless.’
Grace had hoped to share a home with Bobby, but the group divvied up the few available rooms by gender, Grace sharing a double bed with a girl named June who snored and kicked her way through each night, giving Grace an excuse to slip out early each morning to stand hidden behind an ancient oak as Bobby emerged from his own lodgings and trail him unobtrusively to the church. Evenings, she followed a similar ritual, lingering outside the white frame church while those inside reviewed the day’s events and planned the next day’s action, then tiptoeing through yards and ducking behind buildings as she followed him home, her actions an uncomfortable reminder of the way she’d tried to avoid catching the eye of Todd Burris, her high school nemesis.
Then, she’d been trying to protect herself. Now, she was honoring her promise to her mother to protect her brother.
‘I won’t let anything happen to him. I swear.’
But day after day continued quiet, Chateau doing what Chateau did best, turning its back on unpleasantness, covering its ears, averting its gaze. Wait long enough, and most bad things – everything from inclement weather to a broken heart – resolve on their own.
‘It’s frustrating,’ Bobby told Walter one night. He’d agreed to a series of exclusive interviews that Walter would use as the basis for a special report in the Afro: Inside Civil Disobedience.
Grace had found some pretext to drop by Miss Lydia’s house, where Walter and Bobby were boarding, and sat with them in the kitchen, shades drawn against the possibility of any outside gaze, the room stifling. A plate of Miss Lydia’s nut bread sat untouched on the kitchen table. She baked something new each day, tutting and fussing over her charges. Grace took a piece and nibbled at it. It was too hot to eat, but Miss Lydia had gone to the trouble.
‘They want to wait us out. Think we’ll go away.’
Walter took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it out and blotted his glistening forehead. ‘But you’ll have to at some point. People have to get back to their jobs, to school.’
Privately, he’d confessed to Grace that he was about to give up on the idea of a series. It was hard to write about an action when there was no action to speak of. She’d gone cold at the thought. She’d never considered the possibility that Walter might return to Baltimore, expecting her to go with him, forcing her into the awful position of having to choose between going back to her job at the Afro or staying to watch over her brother – and kissing her job goodbye.
‘But they won’t be able to ignore what we’re doing next.’
‘What’s that?’ Walter’s hand kept straying to his suit jacket, hanging over the back of his chair. Grace knew his cigarettes resided in an inner pocket and knew as well that Miss Lydia forbade smoking in her home. Walter’s irritation – at a story falling flat, and at his own urgent need for a smoke – was nearly palpable. Grace edged the plate of nut bread toward him, hoping to distract him.
‘A march. Tomorrow’s Saturday, when all the town people will be running errands and the country people come in to do their shopping. What they’ll see is all our people marching down the middle of Commerce Street.’
Walter snorted, his frustration as clear and pointed as the phrasing in his columns.
‘With what – all twelve of you? So the good white people of Chateau can do what they’ve been doing these last two weeks? Turn their backs and wait until you all have left so everything can go back to the way it’s always been?’
‘With speakers.’ Bobby sliced off a thick piece of nut bread and slathered it with butter slowly melting despite Miss Lydia’s placing the crock in a bowl of ice water. ‘Miss Lydia,’ he called into the parlor where she ostensibl
y retired each evening to study her Bible but which, of course, enabled her to overhear every word spoken in the kitchen. ‘This is the best nut bread I’ve ever eaten in my life.’
Walter executed an eye roll so prolonged it made Grace think of her mother’s admonition whenever she pouted. ‘Someday your face gonna freeze like that.’
‘Preaching to the choir,’ he said. ‘What white person is going to come listen to you? Or black people, for that matter? Waste of time.’
Grace kept herself barely awake by imagining Walter living the rest of his life with his eyes rolled up so far in his head that only the whites showed.
His voice jerked her awake.
‘You’re shittin’ me. ’Scuse me, ma’am,’ he called into the parlor.
Grace opened her eyes. She’d missed something important. Walter’s eyes were right where they belonged in their sockets, alert with the sort of curiosity she hadn’t seen from him in days.
‘How’d you get him? Last I heard, he was getting so many death threats he’s been lying low. For some strange reason, he doesn’t trust the FBI to protect him.’ Walter and Bobby shared a chuckle, while Grace tried to figure out a way to ask who they were talking about without betraying the fact that she’d dozed off.
‘He went to Morgan, at least before he dropped out and joined up with the Panthers.’
The bread fell from Grace’s hand, spilling crumbs across the table. Marcus Simmons was coming to Chateau? He’d been briefly jailed a few months earlier after being charged with inciting a riot in Virginia, where he’d given a speech so inflammatory the blacks and whites listening from opposite sides of the street charged one another, breaking through the police lines meant to keep them apart, and tearing into each other with fists and feet, and baseball bats that had been stashed in alleyways for just such an opportunity.
Whenever her brother talked about Simmons, he mentioned his Morgan State connection. He must have worked the college channels to find him and persuade him to come to Chateau.
Walter’s whistle was long and low. ‘Can’t imagine anyone ignoring Marcus. You got a parade permit?’