Till You Hear From Me: A Novel

by Pearl Cleage

  “There’s a lot more online,” she said, opening the white takeout containers and sniffing the contents of each. “I put the links in the email for you. These are just to give you a sense of what the guy’s been up to.”

  Wes took a cursory look through the things she had printed out. A piece about the kickoff of the registration campaign. A piece about the Rev’s group BAC-UP!—Black Activist Clergy United for Progress—and how they had managed to get all these churches to work together. Some pictures of the Rev standing on somebody’s front porch with voter registration forms.

  Talk about old-school, Wes thought, glad all over again that he had had the good sense to head north as fast as he could figure out a way to get there.

  “Why are you so interested in this guy all of a sudden?”

  “My boy called me from the Republican National Committee. His people are worried about Georgia in the midterms, and the presence of one hundred thousand new, energized Democratic voters does not make them happy.”

  Toni was spooning out the meal on both plates while Wes’s eyes scanned the pages quickly. He would check the videos tomorrow. The food aromas demanded his attention and he heard his stomach growling loudly. He closed the folder and put it aside.

  “Go on,” she said, as he removed the wine from the freezer and reached for two wineglasses.

  “They want to know three things,” Wes said, opening the wine efficiently and pouring them each a glass. “How he did it. How they can stop him from doing it again, and how they can get hold of those names.”

  “Your contact told you all that on the phone?”

  Wes shook his head. “Paranoid as these guys are, they’ll barely tell you when they want to meet, much less why they’re calling. All he said was they wanted to talk about the recent high-volume voter registration efforts in Georgia and since I was from there, they thought I might be able to assist them.”

  “And can you assist them, Mr. Harper?” she said, raising her glass.

  “I can do better than that,” he said, clinking his glass against hers lightly. “I can introduce them to my pastor.”

  She took a sip of her wine. “Are they also in need of spiritual counseling?”

  “My pastor happens to be Reverend Doctor Horace A. Dunbar, the man of the hour.”

  Her eyes widened. “He’s your pastor?”

  Wes nodded and took a bite of his Mongolian Beef. “I grew up in his church.”

  Toni put down her glass and shook her head.

  “What?”

  “Why can’t I picture you as a little kid sitting in Sunday school?”

  “Because you have a woefully limited imagination,” he said. “I was a member of the junior choir and treasurer of the Youth Fellowship for three years running.”

  She laughed again. “What happened the fourth year?”

  He grinned at her again. “I discovered the pursuit of pussy and my church attendance fell off a little, but you didn’t let me finish.”

  She took another small sip of her wine. Toni wasn’t a big eater. “By all means, finish.”

  “The Rev. Dunbar is also my dad’s best friend.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Wes shook his head. “I kid you not. They have coffee together three or four mornings a week. All I have to do is ask my dad if I can stay with him for a couple of days and all the information I need will come walking up the front steps.”

  “Well, that wraps it up with a bow,” she said. “You can sell out the race and betray your father’s trust all in one fell swoop.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  That was another thing he liked about Toni. She shared his ability to dismiss any claims of racial solidarity that conflicted with the interests of their clients. He thought of the two of them as part of the vanguard of post-racial African American professionals who were free at last to pimp the race without pretending they were trying to save it.

  “Did you tell the RNC guy all this?”

  “Hell, no,” Wes said, refilling their glasses. “Too much information all at one time isn’t good for white folks. Anything of particular interest in the video clips?”

  “Not much,” Toni said, nibbling a piece of broccoli delicately. “There is one with the good reverend and some of his contemporaries really roasting Obama and then one from two days ago where he suggests in an interview with The Atlanta Constitution that unchecked diversity may result in black churches being forced to serve tacos and sangria on Communion Sunday.”

  Wes choked on a spring roll. “He said what?”

  “Tacos and sangria,” Toni said when Wes stopped coughing. “The whole thing is kind of bizarre actually. He’s apparently still really mad at the president.”

  “All those old guys are still mad.”

  “Because of Jeremiah Wright?”

  “That’s part of it,” Wes said, helping himself to the last spring roll. “But I think it’s just hard for them to admit that whether they were ready or not, the torch has been passed.”

  “But that’s what they were all working for, wasn’t it? A chance for black folks to rise and be first-class American citizens?” she said. “Well, they did it. They won. They should be celebrating their victory.”

  “They don’t know how to celebrate,” Wes said. “They’re warriors. What they know how to do is fight, struggle, organize. Stepping aside to make room for new blood isn’t part of their makeup.”

  She looked at him and grinned. “So I guess Etta James spoke for them all when she offered to whip Beyoncé’s young ass for singing her song at the inauguration.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “That wasn’t about the song. That was about being iconed to death when all she really wanted to do was sing.”

  “What does the Reverend Dunbar want?”

  “I won’t know that until I get down there and have a chance to talk to him. These guys are ripe to flip their party affiliations, and that would be a real coup. It’s just a matter of using that anger to our advantage.”

  “I think you are the most perfectly amoral person I’ve ever met.”

  “Coming from you,” he said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I meant it as one.”

  “They’re being so damn secretive about the meeting, they want to get together on Sunday morning at seven A.M. They told me to come alone, but I said I had to have one staffer there. You.”

  “Why thank you, sir. You know I always like to be the only girl.”

  “You just be on your best behavior.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll wear my corporate drag. Dark pants suit. String of pearls.”

  “But not too conservative,” he said. “These guys always like to see a little leg.”

  “Oh, yeah? Any of ’em ass men? Or are they just assholes?”

  He laughed and stood up. “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  He picked up the plates and stacked them in the kitchen. That was enough business for one night. He sat down on the couch and took the wine with him. Toni came to sit beside him, kicking off her shoes and tucking her feet up between them.

  “You figure you’ll have to go down there awhile if all this works out?”

  “Probably,” he said, gently massaging the foot closest to him. “Why?”

  She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Maybe I can come and visit you. We could make out on the couch in your dad’s rec room.”

  He squeezed each well-pedicured toe gently. “My dad doesn’t have a rec room.”

  “Well, where did you make out when you were a kid?”

  “I was in boarding school. Most of my making out was between me and my strong right hand.”

  She laughed and opened her eyes. “Why does that turn me on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But forget about it. If you have to come down, which I do not anticipate, you’ll stay at the Four Seasons.”

  “Why is that?” she said, touching him softly without unzipping his pants. “Are you ashamed to introduc
e me to your father?”

  He looked at Toni’s perfect face, perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect teeth, perfect, perfect breasts, and smiled at the very idea of anyone being ashamed of anything associated with this girl.

  “Shame has nothing to do with it,” he said, squeezing her left breast lightly. “My father is an old man with a weak heart, and you, beautiful girl, are a screamer.”

  She threw back her head and laughed, then ran her hands through her hair again in that movie star gesture he loved. “Whose fault is that, Big Daddy?”

  “Yours,” he said, not caring if she was just buttering him up. Lying was his favorite kind of foreplay. “Which is why you’ve got to be punished.”

  She stood up, slid her skirt down over her hips, stepped gracefully out of her silky pink barely there thong, but slipped back into her black stilettos. That was one of the sexiest things about Toni, he thought. She always wore heels that lifted up that fine ass like she was putting it on a platter.

  “If there is any punishing to be done,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse and dropping it to the floor, “I will be the one doing it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, but as he pulled her close, she suddenly grabbed his balls and squeezed them hard enough that he actually yelped in protest. “Hey!”

  “Now who’s the screamer?” she cooed, releasing him with a grin.

  He pulled her down onto his lap and buried his face between her breasts. He was going to miss this girl when her man finally finished med school and made an honest woman of her. But for tonight, her heart belonged to Daddy.

  FIVE

  Greeting the Ghosts

  WHEN I PULLED UP IN FRONT OF MY FATHER’S HOUSE, IN MY LITTLE white rental car, I was glad he wouldn’t be there. Not because I didn’t want to see him. In spite of everything, I love the Rev like I love my life, but coming home has a certain rhythm to it if it’s going to be done right. A certain sacredness, and a big dose of self-preservation. That’s why I always try to arrive when the Rev is occupied elsewhere, so that I can close that big front door behind me and spend a few minutes alone, greeting the ghosts and reviewing the protocols.

  This is, after all, the house of Rev. Horace A. Dunbar, gifted orator, fearless Civil Rights warrior, Founding Pastor, now Pastor Emeritus at Rock of Faith Community Church, advisor to mayors, congressmen, and even a president or two. Loving father, misunderstood husband, lifelong servant of the people. Attention must be paid. My father was one of the lions of the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement and although his name is not as well known as some of his contemporaries, his courage is legendary, his contributions undeniable. I grew up in a house where a bona fide hero sat at the head of our table, and we all knew it.

  If you doubted it for a minute, the photographs are everywhere to remind you. There he is hanging on the wall in the hallway, leading a picket line in front of Rich’s Department Store downtown because black folks could buy clothes there, they just weren’t allowed to try them on first. There he is on the desk in his study, shaking hands with Martin Luther King Jr., two days before The March on Washington, or on the living room mantel talking head-to-head with Brother Malcolm, or on the wall of the breakfast nook, receiving a proclamation for Rev. Horace A. Dunbar Day from Mayor Maynard Jackson, or even in a candid shot, laughing in the backyard with Mr. Eddie. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing, it’s always there. In his eyes. In the way he smiles. There’s that certainty. That absolute conviction that there is a right and wrong of things; that the arc of the universe is long, but it does bend toward justice.

  I took my suitcase upstairs to my old bedroom, still decorated with the pale pink wallpaper my mother let me pick out for my tenth birthday. The one picture of her the Rev allows in the house sits on my dresser in a little silver frame. It’s a picture of the three of us on Tybee Island, near Savannah, when I was still a toddler. I don’t know who took it, probably Mr. Eddie, but my mother is young and beautiful and happy to be standing in the crook of my father’s arm. She’s holding me by the hand, but she’s looking up at the Rev, who is looking right back, and it is such an intimate, sensual glance between them that whenever I see it, I feel almost like I’m intruding on their privacy, even all these years later.

  That photograph used to be downstairs on the mantel, but after Mom left, he moved it up here. I guess he couldn’t stand to put it away, but he couldn’t take seeing it every day either. I don’t remember my parents being in love like that. By the time I was old enough to notice, things had already cooled considerably. Sometimes I think she was just waiting for me to graduate and go off to college before she made her move. I always appreciated that. They’ve been separated now almost as long as they lived together, but neither one of them has ever gotten around to filing for divorce. They talk to each other more than either one ever admits to me, but unless they drag me into those discussions, I steer clear. My parents did not raise a fool.

  This house is full of ghosts. Not the chain clanking, boo in the night kind. More like spirits. Energy left behind when the courageous souls who used to fill this house with endless talk of revolution and resistance, the possibility of transformation and the necessity of love, finally passed on, or moved on, or in my case, moved out. And not a moment too soon, I might add. That self-preservation thing again. It was hard to find room to breathe in this house when I was growing up, much less get a word in edgewise. My father needed all the air and he sure had a lock on all the words.

  His voice seemed to have an infinite capacity to convey every human emotion, but no ability to modulate itself to everyday exchanges. The Rev’s voice didn’t just resonate. It boomed, commanding the attention of everyone within the sound of it. Whether he was calling for a march on City Hall or complimenting Miss Iona on her Easter Sunday hat, when he spoke, you had to listen. Or if you had any sense you did, because that was the other thing about my father. He was always right. I was twenty-five before I ever heard him admit to a mistake, and it was, of course, a minor infraction. That’s what makes him such a great leader. He’s always absolutely certain that what he’s suggesting is the right thing to do.

  I need somebody like that in my life again. Somebody who can look me in the eye and say, This is what is happening and this is what you need to do about it. My father used to fill that role, but since he stopped speaking to me five months ago, or, let me be fair, since we stopped speaking to each other, I’m kind of out here on my own. My mother is entirely too ideological to be much good in the personal advice area. Tell my mother that some dude just broke your heart and she will tell you why the patriarchy is the root of all evil, which may or may not be true, but which is not very useful to a recently deflowered sixteen-year-old who just realized her first lover wasn’t going to be her only one.

  I know as a thirty-four-year-old woman, I’m supposed to be able to do that for myself, but lately I’ve been kind of falling down on the job and I don’t really trust myself to do the right thing anymore. Take my Sitting at the Right Hand of Obama fantasy. Where did that come from? I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks and I still don’t know how I could have been so wrong. Maybe it was just the unavoidable spillover of an extended idealistic perfect moment, or maybe it was a grievously overinflated sense of my own importance to the campaign, but whatever it was, I was so sure I was going to get a White House job offered to me that I didn’t even have a backup plan. I still don’t!

  When my old boss called me while I was working on the campaign in New Mexico to tell me that there were going to be cutbacks in my area, I wasn’t worried. I just knew I would have other options. After all, I had carried out my first few assignments without a hitch and moved up in the campaign hierarchy quickly. I’m not going to lie and say I was flying around with Valerie Jarrett and David Axel-rod, but I met the candidate enough times for him to remember my name once and for the first lady to compliment my haircut at an event in Santa Fe.

  The campaign was an exciting, all-consuming, alternate universe. There was so much
work to do, and I was good at most of it. I was surrounded by a steady stream of interesting people who were as passionate about the possibilities as I was and we worked nonstop at whatever tasks were at hand. In the early days, there were more computer geeks around than community organizers. Most of the young people who were volunteering had all the technical expertise in the world, but when it came time to motivate a bunch of hopeful voters huddled together in a community center some place where people still get most of their mail deposited out front by a guy who knows their names, these kids were clueless.

  But being the Rev’s daughter, I was right at home. That kind of house-by-house organizing is in my blood. My father is still the best I ever saw at taking a scared group of nervous neighbors and helping them shape themselves into a cohesive political unit, capable of great courage in the face of even the most implacable foe. The lessons I’d learned riding all over Georgia with the Rev and Mr. Eddie came back strong and those basics became part of one of the most successful grassroots campaigns the country has ever seen. The president gets big respect for using the Internet in revolutionary ways, but he deserves equal praise for his ability to adapt old-school techniques to new-school possibilities. I’m as proud of the role I played in all of it as I’ve ever been of anything I’ve ever done. The Rev would be, too, if he could ever stop fussing long enough to enjoy it.

  For the first time, I felt like I was part of something that was going to change America forever. I wondered if this was what the best of the sixties felt like to my father’s generation. When I asked him, he laughed and said I was what they used to call freedom high, drunk with the possibility of living free. Whatever you call it, I was caught up in a moment unlike any other I had experienced and I was prepared to go where it took me. The campaign became my whole world and whatever pitiful personal life I’d had fell by the wayside without a whimper.

  To tell the truth, it wasn’t much of a loss. A halfhearted boyfriend who didn’t like oral sex. (The giving of; he was fine with the receiving.) A circle of girlfriends who were getting increasingly antsy as the years went by and nobody in our group was even close to a serious, committed relationship, regardless of gender, much less marriage. Professionally, I had been working my ass off for the last eight years as a fund-raising consultant for struggling nonprofits, but the economy had forced many of our clients to close their doors and the others were too broke to hire us to tell them what to do about it. Like we knew. When I asked for an unpaid leave to work full-time for the Obama campaign, I think my boss was glad to see me go. It meant she didn’t have to tell me face-to-face that I wouldn’t be coming back.