“Don’t hit him,” Hope had said.
Mother had barely whispered the sentence into the air when father slapped the child he was holding high on his hip, hard across the shoulder. Not perhaps so hard, but definite, and hard. Hope had snatched her son from her husband’s arms.
She had known she shouldn’t say what she was about to say in front of the child. And half a second later she had known she had to say it. “I will shoot you if you hit him again.” Right out loud. Watching expressions he had not previously seen flicker across her face, it had occurred to Abel that his wife might just kill him. Into that moment they both had frozen.
Derangement was descending. Without moving, both the man and the boy were reaching for Hope’s breasts. Without moving, both the man and the boy beckoned to Hope’s womb. Man and boy made their claim on what the woman owed them. She owed them both something. Just at that moment she couldn’t see what she owed the man.
Looking with the eyes in her belly, Hope saw that the boy’s fear was virgin and beribboned with hope. The boy was expecting help to come. He was waiting for Mama to fix it, fix everything. The boy was hurt, but he wasn’t cowed by pain.
Somewhere outside of the house, as a necessary evil of modern international antiterrorism, the man was on the road that links I will make you wish you had never been born to I will hear you beg for death. In his particular case this road passed through I will fear nothing, and it passed through Washington. Somehow Hope understood the truth that Abel was a dangerous man even as she heard him promise he would never harm his son.
The child was in his presence but he wasn’t with him. The boy was still virgin to viciousness, still ignorant of purposeful harm, even as the palm marks welted up on his arm.
If evil is a disease, detachment provides no small portion of immunity. The child did not love the man enough to be fully vulnerable to his venomousness. He was afraid of his father but not of his body or his world. Hope knew more about this than she wanted to know. Betrayal by the mama might put a chink in the wall that fenced the boy from self-fear. If the mama looked away, or did not rescue quick enough, the wall might fail.
Hope, who had grown up in the bituminous hills of West Virginia, surrounded by sudden death and general terror—sudden death in the mines; the sudden flood at Bear Creek; Jock Yablonski, union reformer, shot sudden dead in his bed New Year’s Eve 1969, his wife and daughter shot dead near him; Lawrence Jones, shot dead on a Harlan County picket line, the summer before Hope left for high school, 1973; the sudden flash of a pistol from a bra or the brandishing of a tommy gun from a car window as uncommon but not rare events that danced with the sudden burdening threat of bombs, even bombs that did not go off—had intended to live and die without her son knowing terror.
And now a strange anxiety animated her son’s smile. The child’s face was so oddly unlike the man’s. She had picked the wrong daddy for the boy.
She had grabbed the toddler from the man who had slapped his child for crying. Something about it had appalled Abel when, after he had warned the boy to stop bawling, or he would give the boy something to bawl about, Ajay had ascended into wailing. And neither Abel nor Hope had known just why Abel had been so bothered.
I had to hit him. The child had given him no choice. It didn’t matter what the woman had said. It didn’t matter what he had promised. He had forgotten it was the third time. He hadn’t been counting. He didn’t brook defiance. He didn’t know the woman only gave two chances. He only knew he had a beautiful wife, a beautiful son, a beautiful home— and he felt ugly as homemade sin.
For a moment Abel was back in a different room in a different year waiting for a different woman to rescue him. He was at his childhood home on Fifteenth Avenue North waiting for his mother, Antoinette. And then he was returned, still in a room waiting for a woman to rescue his younger self, but the woman who arrived rescued the other boy.
“No, I’m not leaving you,” Hope said. She loved him. She was as obedient as he had trained her to be.
He was pacified. He imagined himself, later that same morning, sucking on her breast, looking up at her face, and after that doing very grown-up things with and to his wife. He loved rolling in his woman’s arms. If she let him do it enough times, one night, one morning, he thought he might roll out grown.
“I’m not leaving you.” For a moment everything was all right. Then she said, “I’m going to buy a gun and shoot you.”
The woman was crazy.
“There’s nothing in me that will let me look the other way,” wife said to husband just as she was falling out of love. Abel had never loved Hope more.
As he lay dying, Abel remembered falling in love with Clementine Hope Morgan Jones. He remembered knowing his son had the mother he had wished for.
The children born in his second marriage, Laura, Alice, and Nicole, called Lauro, Ali, and Nicola, had something else. They had a Sears and Roebuck white country girl, Sammie, bless her heart sweet Sammie, pageant pretty, who couldn’t cook or keep house, but she would let him do what ever the hell it was he wanted with her big boys—from scare them straight to send them off to the war— and she looked tidy in a size-four dress. That did him some good but what good did it do the girls? He was counting on genes and money. There would be little nurture, there would be no black folk or street knowledge, but there would be money and white skins and maybe some I.Q. points. She would raise them white and they would be all right.
He lay sprawled, his inhaler on the ground, just out of reach. A stranger began to crouch over him. Abel barely noticed. Abel was too busy hoping the woman had enough sense to take his creamy angels off to Montana, or Iowa, or Wyoming, or Alaska, any place they could forget about everything about him but the fact he was White House Special Advocate at the Pentagon and that he had graduated from Harvard.
He wanted his second wife to forget his mother’s Christian name, forget his grandmother’s Christian name. He trusted it would be easy to forget what she had barely known. They had had so little contact with his black family. He was “the third” but he had not given any of his girls family names. Sammie hadn’t wanted it. Truth be told he hadn’t wanted it either. A white-sounding name was good grease for anyone wishing to slip the shackles of caste.
To be called Abel Jones was to wear a heavy-weighted chain, the key to the lock of which had long ago disappeared, perhaps down Abel the third’s throat. Freakonomics was too thin a chisel to break that stout chain. A bigger chisel was coming and Abel would help break the chain, but right now Abel Jones was a black man’s name, infamous, or famous, depending on your perspective, throughout Tennessee, throughout the South. Abel Jones Jr. had desegregated every public school system in Tennessee, except Shelby County, every city except Memphis, and half the counties of North Carolina, riding up and down winding dirt roads, bomb threats behind him, bullet shots ahead, never slowing down.
Now just outside the men’s-room door marked CAVALIERS a vacationing doctor from Michigan crouched beside him and began to examine Abel’s face with an air of professional competence. When Abel heard the man’s flat voice calling into his cell phone for an ambulance, Abel suspected the northern tourist didn’t recognize he was black. Abel was dying white. It was a triumph.
Ambulance called, the northern doctor was still jabbering, mumbling about the South. Folks were fatter here. This fellow was no exception. The fine and polished leather of the man’s shoes, the heavy gold rims of his spectacles, the heavily carved shield of his class ring, and the chemically enhanced brightness of his teeth told the doctor his patient was prosperous as well as plump. Imagining a family very much like his own, a girl and a boy, ski trips and summer camps, private schools and SUVs, the Yankee doctor began CPR, cracking a rib.
Abel was thinking about his father. A Durham magazine had run an issue with a giant glossy picture of his face on the cover and a headline asking, “Is this the most hated man in North Carolina?” The black folks down on Parrish Street had thought the better questi
on might have been “Is this the most feared man in North Carolina?” When Durham cousins recaptioned the cover as a joke they inscribed, “Is this the angriest man in the nation?” Abel Jones Jr. tore that copy of the cover in half, announcing, “The most hated man in this land is also the angriest. And he is feared, and I am he.” Abel Jones Jr. said all that, then he smiled. When he smiled, the graduate of North Carolina Central, law school and college, looked just like the man on the cover of the magazine.
Abel wanted to tell this graying blond white man with blue eyes that it was not his heart that was failing; it was his body that refused to be invaded anew. He wondered how long it would take before his wife came looking for him. He wondered if the Yankee doctor had ever ventured to Idlewild. He worried that if they left this strange restaurant, this little sphere where everyone thought he was white, no one would believe the woman with the raven hair and the girls with the light eyes were his, that outside this place, separated from the family, once he was in the ambulance, alone in the hospital, everywhere else along the way, he would be recognized as a black man.
Earlier in the day Abel and this second family, seven children who kept him broke, had fidgeted, then frozen before a painted backdrop, after he had paid eighty-five dollars he didn’t have, charging yet another expense to an already overtaxed credit card, to a young photographer who actively sought a sight of the souls his subjects strove so tenaciously to hide. The woman looked tired and pretty. The man looked exasperated and puffy. The children looked bored. Sea of Whiteness, the photographer silently titled the portrait. He named all the portraits he attempted hour after hour, Saturday through Saturday. Sea of Whiteness, this one was. Sea of Whiteness. No one would ever think, gazing at the portrait, though the photographer taking the shot had noticed before his lights washed the beige out, that Abel, flanked by his wife on one side, her children on the other, with their children folded at their feet, was anything but a normal, white man.
Abel was grateful. He was circling closer to peace when the smoke from a long-ago fire found its way to his nostrils. Abel coughed through his nose. The Michigan physician mistook the cough for a sign of life.
The ambulance attendants arrived. These men knew nothing of Italian leather, nothing of gold glasses, nothing of the black-haired woman, nothing of the green-and blue-and gray-eyed children. They only saw a Yankee doctor giving CPR to a nigger.
Close-cropped the hair might be, but it was kinky. Light the skin might be, but it was beige. And there was that face, a face neither Yancey nor Waddell could ever forget, the face of the man who had twenty-five years before, twenty years before, and may-be just fifteen years before come up to the mountains making trouble, suing this one for not serving niggers, and that one for making a separate school for niggers, and somebody else altogether for somehow mistreating their niggers. The face on the magazine cover they had long used for target practice was lying at their feet.
He hadn’t aged a day. Black magic. He looked just like he looked when he had come up and defended the nigger that had raped the nice white lady. They didn’t know the Abel they remembered was long dead, that this Abel they were lifting into the ambulance hated that man far more than they could possibly hate him. The paramedics didn’t know that and wouldn’t have understood it if they had been told. They simply killed the Abel they had.
Or rather, they didn’t do what they could have to revive him. The Michigan doctor suspected heart attack; the country boys sent by Mountain View Hospital with the painted-all-over-green Mountain View Hospital ambulance stamped with tarheels knew allergy when they saw it: they saw it enough in this dinner theater with horses and no ventilation. Horses and food didn’t belong together indoors but if people were too foolish to know that, well, then let ’em die and improve the breed. It made more work for paramedics and paramedic was good-paying work.
Except always before the fools were white. The fool at their feet was the biggest fool in the world, a nigger with no more sense than to eat his dinner in a Confederate horse barn. It was hard to believe God would make any creature, even a nigger, as dumb as that. Kind of made the men wonder if there was a God.
As they lifted his bulk onto the stretcher, Abel could feel the whiteness in the paramedic’s fingertips touching the blackness of his skin. It was a familiar sensation. He knew it from basketball courts and doctors’ offices; he knew it differently from feather-beds and beaches, from blankets on the grass. Sometimes with a woman it was a good thing, the frisson of white touching black. With a man it was always bad. With a man there was no difference, or there was a sad difference. Men, in Abel’s experience, always want other men to be what they are, or less than they are. And if they are less than they are they want to beat them, or do more and worse.
He had come to the Rebel Yell fully prepared to see the Confederate flag waved over the dinner he paid good money to eat. He had come prepared to eat heaping helpings of white people’s country cooking, humming along as the fiddle sobbed out I wish I was in de land of cotton old times dere are not forgotten. He had come to the mountains of North Carolina because it was what his wife’s people did, when they weren’t riding bulls, or playing bluegrass, or at the NASCAR races. He had crossed a final frontier.
And now, as if the paramedics were celestial minions, as if his dead father really was in charge of the world, and thus the world was wretched, for the old man had proved himself inadequate to the task of being in charge of everything—the falsely accused rapist had gone to jail and died in jail; the schools of Nashville were more segregated in 2005 than in 1965; the Klan that had burned a cross on the lawn of Abel’s house during his thirteenth birthday party was still holed up in the hollers and byways of America; the Southern Poverty Law Center, when tallying The Year in Hate, 2005, would count 803 active hate groups, at least one in every state of the nation— Abel, who had crossed over into the world of whiteness, was snatched back to black, the second before his life on earth ended.
If he had been living, Abel Jones Jr., Big Abel, would have smiled seeing his son know payback when he saw it.
Abel Jones the third died in a slow ambulance ride to a country hospital. The paramedics wrote “black” so many times over the receiving papers that when the funeral home employees got the paperwork they sucked their teeth in dismay.
Something Abel inhaled in Waynesville—where people ride around on horse back, indoors, waving Confederate flags above the heads of pudgy men, women, and children and the occasional Japanese tourist— triggered the series of events that led to his tragic death en route to the hospital, or so the conventional wisdom opined loudly.
Abel knew better. All that appears tragic is not. He closed his eyes as the stretcher was secured in the vehicle. He did not want to see the men who had taken custody of his body. He would not let it be them who killed him by moving at all deliberate speed. How did we forget that all deliberate speed is slowly? He would not acknowledge the presence of the ambulance men. He knew what to withhold to confound his captors. He knew how to protect what little remained of who he had been born to be.
He had let his back be a bridge. Now he would break his back. He would slow his colleagues down. He would give the new man a better chance. ABC. A Better Chance. His wife, his first wife, Hope, would be the only person in the world who would get that joke.
As the ambulance door shut, Abel saw the face that looked so much like his own, the boy with the brown eyes and brilliance, the one whose mother would never have allowed him to bring any of them to the Rebel Yell. He saw Ajay, his firstborn, little Abel, his rebel who would do more than yell.
Then Abel Jones, lawyer for Abu Ghraib, crossed back over to where he had begun, the other side of terror.
TWO
THANKS GIVING FOUND THE former Mrs. Abel Jones the third standing in the middle of an appropriately cold November night, in the middle of her hypermodern kitchen, in the middle of a glass box, in the middle of Tennessee, packing old-fashioned breakfast sacks, ham biscuits with blackb
erry jam, pondering a half-finished sculpture in her workshop, and mulling over the proposition that black men are an endangered species.
Biscuit by biscuit she was doing her part to preserve the black men she loved—and raise the one she had borne onto a path that would (she begged God and a pantheon of ebony angels nightly, some of whom were depicted, albeit provocatively, in her current piece, a partly welded mass in the barn) lead to a fertile and sheltering maturity.
It might have all been simpler if her son had been her husband’s child, but he wasn’t and her household was simple enough. Abel’s nature nurtured by Hope and Waycross created a fine chiseled bronze boy with neat dreads, old-school manners, and a vocabulary that ranged from a’fuck to xenophobia. He was a sweet and fearless son.
Waycross hadn’t fallen in love to clean up Abel’s mess but he had fallen in love and cleaned up Abel’s mess.
“Ajay’s what I would have been if I had been brought up by you,” Abel said to Hope when he had come by to see the boy and had stood on her grass terrace a few weeks earlier, just after their six-foot-and-getting-taller sixteen-year-old boy had won some debate competition or another. Hope had had to will herself not to get taken in by Abel’s unexpected flattery.
She split the last of the still-warm sweet potato biscuits in two, smeared both halves with blackberry jam, then put a big forkful of country ham in the middle, feeling fortunate.
Her present husband, Dr. D. Hale Williams Blackshear (called Waycross), and her son, Abel Jones IV (called Ajay), were, as far as Clementine Hope Jones Blackshear (née Morgan) knew, outside loading the Ford Expedition with coolers and rifles and duffel bags.
The males in Waycross’s family hunted the weekend after Thanksgiving. From the first year of Hope’s second marriage, her son and her husband had claimed the last days of the Michigan deer season as their almost-father, almost-son time.
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