Sometimes they were passed by a black family, smiling and waving, in a bucket of rust. One blue clunker had a JFK bumper sticker on its tail. It beeped out recognition on the horn as it passed. Apparently the occupants recognized the Thunderbird Big Abel was driving as being the same model of car as was featured in JFK’s inaugural parade. Any other day that would have been solace.
This is the story gossip told.
ONE
ABEL DIED AT the Rebel Yell. He got up from the long table where he was seated with his white family, complained of shortness of breath, then headed for the toilets. His raven-haired wife, who had already made three trips (each time with a child in tow) through the door marked MAGNOLIAS across from the door marked CAVALIERS, hardly seemed to notice.
Samantha, Abel’s wife, and her four almost-grown sons from a previous marriage, high school boys, two sets of twins, remained in their seats.
They were absorbed with gobbling fried chicken and swilling sweet tea. Horses were galloping through the dining room. The sound of banners and flags crackling in the dim and dusty air created a hypnotic counter-rhythm against the quintessential noise of wars from long ago, the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat of hoof-beats. “That’s the sound,” Abel had said, “of horses galloping in the direction of their master’s murderous gaze.” The big kids, lulled into a lazy stupor at the dinner theater with horses, war songs, and Confederate battle reenactors, hadn’t heard what he had said and didn’t notice that he had left.
Only his three little daughters, one with immense blue eyes, one with slanty green, one with sweet gray—the children Samantha had borne Abel after his first wife, Hope, a brown-haired, brown-eyed, brown-skinned sculptress, had thrown him out of the little yellow cottage—only his creamy-skinned angels noticed. Liberated by Abel’s absence, the girls rose from their seats.
Running round the table instead of eating, the girls bumped into waiters carrying heavy laden platters of canned black-eyed peas and canned corn, canned collard greens and canned sweet potatoes, keeping an eye peeled for Daddy’s return, until they too forgot the man.
After a good long while, the three-year-old, sufficiently exhausted and bored to be frightened by computer-generated illusions of bombs bursting in air and rockets’ red glare, returned to Mother’s lap, while the six-year-old nuzzled her way back into the space between the inside of Mother’s arm and her rib cage, resting her head on Mother’s cool rayon-covered bosom while standing on her own small, hot feet. The nine-year-old found her way into Abel’s chair.
And so it was that not so very far from their sight, just inside the gray-tiled bathroom marked CAVALIERS, but so very far from the consciousness of his white family, Abel sucked on an asthma inhaler that brought no echo hit of rushing air.
Technology was failing him. He who had, as White House special advocate at the Pentagon, sent so many young men, some boys no older than the woman’s oldest teenage son, to meet their death surrounded by strangeness and strangers, armed only with the inventions of their more ambitious and more able betters, was meeting his own death amid strangeness, among strangers. Technology was failing him.
It was a good joke. If he had had breath to laugh he would have. But he didn’t, so he didn’t. He sucked harder for the air that couldn’t enter, sealed out by some unnamed secretion of his own body.
Breathing is an invasive procedure. Abel refused to be invaded again. Absolutely refused. Not one step back. Giddified by oxygen deprivation, the truth bounced about his brain uncensored until he spoke it aloud, I am going to die.
It was almost, for a moment, like he could breathe deep. He had spoken the truth that he knew to be most significant. Finally.
For once he was not banking a verbal shot off some calculated rhetorical ridge, not speaking to set in motion a series of actions and reactions that would make it all but impossible for anyone involved to discern whose intention was being manifested. He was going to die. And just like the boys he had sent to die in Iraq, he prayed his death would serve a larger purpose.
He was far from home, farther than one might think a man could travel in forty-five years.
The day Abel was born, sweet tucked deep in the dark South, Langston Hughes, out west on a speaking tour, typed a little poem in celebration. In Paris, Richard Wright received three different postcards and a letter shouting the good news, as well as, eventually, the official engraved baby announcement with its blue satin bow that would make its way to seventeen states of the Union and four foreign countries. So the street talk went.
Abel was colored-baby royalty. Related by blood or marriage to both W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, he was also reputed to be kin to Charles Drew by marriage. Adam Clayton Powell had been, and Thurgood Marshall was, a close personal friend of the family.
Infant Abel was as fortunate in his choice of era as he was in his choice of friends and relations. For the first time in the history of America the birth of a Negro boy was cause for almost-only happy expectations.
The bulbs of pride were in the soil, planted side by side with patience, perseverance, and our-time-is-now-ness, just waiting to peek out their heads. It was 1959. Black was just about to bust out beautiful, creating a new kingdom awaiting a new prince— and then came Abel.
“There’s something about that kid,” folk gathered round his hospital bassinet or peering at him through the nursery viewing glass said over and over. Born at Meharry’s Hubbard Hospital, on the north side of Nashville, Abel first saw light inside the doors of one of the nation’s great black institutions. At the time of his birth (the first stroke of six on a Wednesday) Meharry Medical College had graduated, if we let the gossip of North Nashville tell the story, eighty percent of all the black doctors practicing in the world, to say nothing of introducing near to a hundred percent of the most adventurous of the beautiful colored girls attending Fisk University, located directly across a two-lane road from the Meharry, to the joys of love. Hubbard Hospital was a place that thought it had seen every flavor of colored infant: the slow, the fast, the strong, the weak, the rich-as-we-get and the poor-as-we-come, wearing every hue of birthday suit from sweet cream to dark chocolate. And then came a new flavor.
Nobody had seen a baby like Abel. Born three weeks overdue, he smiled before he was forty-eight hours old. The old nurses sang “John Henry” round his crib, the young nurses sang “Hoochie Coochie Man.” He slept through the night the day his mama and daddy took him home. By the time he was a month old he drank two eight-ounce bottles of milk before nodding off, and soaked through three diapers while he slept, never waking up, never getting diaper rash. Whenever he screamed he wanted something. When he got what he wanted he got back to smiling.
When he got grown he would tell that story to his children, over and over again. It was how he wanted to be remembered.
Black lawyers and doctors, funeral home owners and taxi company operators, they all scrambled to purchase one-hundred-dollar savings bonds for Abel, as Abel’s daddy had scrambled to purchase bonds for their sons and nephews. Everybody wanted an invitation to his christening party.
The bonds exclaimed: This little boy owns a piece of America and I bought it for him. This baby child will grow up to be a man. He will live long enough to see this promise mature. He will go to college and need this money. He will buy a house and need this money. He is a citizen for whom I can prepare a future. It was heady stuff. It was a new exuberance. New Year’s Day 1960 was sweet, sweet, sweet in North Nashville.
That Abel would one day choose to pay hundreds of dollars to eat his supper in a Confederate horse barn was bad. That he would spend money earned with the degree funded by the bonds bought for him on the occasion of his birth was worse. That Abel would have a white family to take to the mountains, to the Valhalla of country music, was near impossible.
It was as if he had forgotten what all southern Negroes know: country music had provided the soundtrack, if not to a thousand lynchings, to the drive to a thousand lynchings, and to the getting d
runk after a thousand more.
Not one of the visionary men who had crowded round Abel’s cradle could have imagined Abel’s final vacation. Not one would have believed the news of his peculiar death had it been foretold.
They could have imagined Abel shot down like Malcolm, Medgar, or Martin would be and like dozens of fleeing slaves had been. They could have imagined Abel shot in the ass by a jealous lover, Sam Cooke style, climbing out of his second woman’s third-story window: the boy was pretty-pretty. They could not imagine this old-timey Bessie Smith death.
Too many colored people had died, too many times, on a slow drive to the hospital for men and women of color not to drive in caravans, completely avoiding snow-white counties whenever remotely possible, when they ventured out on vacation.
If hardly anyone still went to Idlewild, there was Highland Beach, and Oak Bluffs, and Sag Harbor, and Hilton Head. These were the towns of the black Riviera.
Waynesville, North Carolina. Hillbilly Land. The place was an impossibility. They did not fear Waynesville, the men who had gathered round Abel’s cradle. Abel wouldn’t go to Waynesville, and if he went he would not go there alone.
They knew this as certainly as they knew that when they spoke the word “alone” they meant away from the company of black people.
It might have been possible for one or two of the great personalities of the Movement to have anticipated a part of Abel’s fate. Someone might have anticipated the Pentagon part of the tragedy; no one would have anticipated Waynesville.
“On your North Carolina vacation, you’ll see bumper boat ponds, racing llamas, fifteen-foot frogs, and Selu the Great Corn Mother. You can dig for sapphires, pan for gold, or fish on an Indian Reservation from a stream stocked three times weekly,” promised the Web page that Sammie had used to make Thanksgiving plans.
Racing llamas, fifteen-foot frogs, bumper boat ponds. Abel would have preferred to have taken his chances with the sharks at the winter beach.
Sammie had whined for the Smoky Mountains. Clog, North Carolina, between Cherokee and Waynesville, was chosen as their base. Twisted in knots by her tongue, flicking here, licking there, Abel had come to agree the kids would enjoy the Black Bear Powwow. The unused tickets were in his pocket when the funeral director returned Abel’s clothes to the widow.
The old black men who would stand at his grave with their ladies in the white cemetery (men whose wives had sent baby rattles and burp cloths, and the women who had wrapped those gifts in white paper and tulle) would cry almost as much because they were being called to stand in a white cemetery as because he was dead. Then they would cry more because they would know in their bones Abel was dead, dead as his father was dead, because they were standing in a white cemetery. And they would know Abel had made them cry. They would know payback when they saw it.
The exquisitely bereaved: old doctors, old lawyers, an old editor, the first black this, the first black that; these men would prefer to believe Abel had died somewhere else, somewhere secret serving his country, somewhere that couldn’t be told. These old men had first hand knowledge that what the government said “ain’t necessarily so.”
These men would know that Abel had died in the Middle East or fucking the president’s wife, died some way other than eating a meal at a dinner theater with Confederate battle-cry reenactments.
But it was so, just so. The fall of 2005, just after the summer 436 soldiers had fallen in Iraq, Abel ventured to North Carolina feeling completely safe. Then he started to die.
He had not feared this end. Renowned in Washington for an uncanny ability to anticipate the most likely worst-case scenario, Abel had only once trembled at the possibility of his own premature death.
In point of fact, Hope, the first wife, had not asked Abel to leave. She went crazy one morning and threatened to kill him. After that he thought it prudent to leave her. They had had a difference of opinion about corporal punishment. Abel believed in it; Hope didn’t. Hope especially didn’t believe in Abel doling it out. The very first time he hit the baby she told him that. The second time she told him she hadn’t liked the look in his eye when he hit the baby. The third time she said if he hit the baby again she would shoot him. She would shoot him and take her chances with the courts. She had said she would wait till he was sleeping to do it. And so he had left the brown beauty. It was possible, perhaps even likely, she had been speaking in anger hyperbolically. It was likely she had intended only to get his attention and win the we-are-modern-liberal-parents argument with a bit of diary-of-a-mad-black-woman histrionics. He couldn’t take the chance. He knew he would hit the baby again if he stayed. And he knew if he did she would do something.
In the last hour of his life, as a crowd of white men gathered round him, he recalled the day, years before, when he had come to know Hope was crazy. She had been wearing a flowery Laura Ashley robe. Her feet were bare. Her toenails were polished a ruddy pink. The rope of fake pearls he had given her for Christmas, telling her they were real, had been hanging round her neck. She bathed and slept in the thing. He recalled her saying she would not be aiming to kill him, but that she might if he moved.
She didn’t tell him what to do. She didn’t tell him to leave. She didn’t tell him not to come back. She knew better than all that. She was not loony-tunes crazy. She just told him what she was going to do, given the chance, and he knew better than to go back to the little yellow cottage, to the place they had laughingly described, the day the Realtor had taken them to see it for the very first time, as the architectural equivalent of Valium.
Only minutes earlier he had anticipated the restoration of equilibrium. Her brown eyes had been soft. He had believed her to be contemplating defeat. She had whispered softly, almost strangely, “No, I’m not calling the police.” He had understood her to be pondering the reality that he would have control of his child’s manners, of his house, that he was the head and the neck of the household, that she was to be the belly and the breasts. And, perhaps, the hands. He liked her hands. The way she cooked. The way she ironed a shirt when he urged her to on the maid’s day off. The way her hands worked with her mouth to give him plea sure. She had wanted to be the belly, the breasts, and the neck, turning the head in the direction she chose. He would let her be the belly, the breast, and the hands.
He could only imagine the joys to come. His father had taught him that a defeated woman was a pleasuring woman. Abel had believed he and his wife were on their way to that, when the softness in Hope’s eyes had vanished.
He had been dressed that day very much as he was dressed at the Rebel Yell, in khakis and a Lacoste, every inch the suburban southern gentleman, except all those years earlier the sizes were smaller and way back then he wore the brighter colors. That day, standing in the front hall of the yellow cottage, his boy in his arms, he had been looking into his woman’s eyes, wearing lime green, when every possibility had altered. There was before, there was after, and there was all that had disappeared.
The fear in their child’s eyes had changed everything.
He had barely tapped the kid. Hope didn’t know what a slap was. Ajay was only two years old but it is never too early for a smart child to start learning obedience. And he worshipped his son. Just that morning he had gotten up early, dressed for his day, dressed the boy for his, then walked with the boy, to the sound of trilling questions and faked army gun blasts, toward the kitchen, where he had sat Ajay in a little blond-wood chair at a little blond-wood table-for-four, well appointed with paper and paint and crayons. Abel would make them a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, a little man’s breakfast, but first there would be juice and Cheerios. The kid always woke up hungry. Abel had poured the cereal. Before he could pour the milk his son had demanded it.
“Milk, Daddy,” Ajay had requested, smiling expectantly. Abel had smiled at the opportunity to teach his son house rules.
“Say, ‘May I have some milk please, Daddy,’ ” Abel had said. Silence had answered him. The father had spo
ken again, this time more emphatically. “May I have some milk please Daddy?” Abel had repeated.
The little boy had started to cry. The strange grammar lesson had continued. May I have some milk please Daddy? Threats mingled with tears. Hope, who had been lying in bed listening for the bleatings of compromise and getting on with the morning, had slipped into a robe and started making her way down the front stairs.
She had stepped into the kitchen smiling broadly, if falsely, a dither of consoling words and a cloud of greeting swirling round her. She had a charm that was not lost upon either of the males in her family. They’d been immediately distracted. She had counted on this. She had lifted the boy from the tiny chair and started marching toward the steps that led to the room with the door she would lock. Abel had grabbed Hope’s arm. The cheerful smell of butter warming in a skillet, waiting for eggs, had scented the air with hominess.
“Give him back to me,” Abel had said, almost sweetly, as if she were crazy to think something was wrong.
“Of course, darling,” Hope had said, her words dripping honey as she held her child close to her chest. With the boy’s head safe, tucked beneath his mother’s chin, Hope had silently mouthed, “Don’t hit him.”
“Of course not,” Abel had snapped out loud.
Hope had handed over the baby. The child had started back to crying.
“Stop crying, or Daddy will ’pank you,” Abel had immediately threatened.
Hope had focused her thought, attempting to will the child into silence while praying for the man to do right. The boy had started crying louder.
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