Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  Samantha suggested that they marry in the garden of her grandmother’s farmhouse, out in Limestone County, Alabama; Abel suggested they marry in the parlor of his grandmother’s house in Davidson County, Tennessee. It was decided.

  Except Grandma would have no part of the thing. This threw Abel for a loop. He had always been a preferred, perhaps the preferred, grandchild. His mother had been the eldest of seven girls, the first to marry, the first to provide a legitimate offspring. It seemed ridiculous for his grandmother, whose skin was so pale, the color of honey mixed into the richest cream, to refuse him this small honor because his bride’s skin was the color of eggshells.

  “It is not her color I don’t like,” Grandma said.

  “What?” Abel asked abruptly, hoping to scare her out of answering.

  “It’s her station,” Grandma, who was too old to be scared, replied.

  At the time, Abel thought he understood. He had always suspected his grandmother was some kind of snob. He thought he could use that. If Grandma was speaking out of high-yellow supremacy, she should understand, if she did not share, his plea-sure in choosing a spouse he could place himself above. She herself had chosen a husband she had placed herself above, until the world had placed the famous paint er above her.

  “What?” asked Abel again, this time more gently. He was curious about anything the old woman might have observed that he hadn’t.

  “In my time always-poor white people were far more dangerous than rich white people, or even used-to-be-rich white people,” said Grandma.

  Abel smiled. In Abel’s experience, Grandma’s experience was rarely relevant. He was willingly informed by her observations and her analysis of the present. But when she started talking about her history— about her great-aunt, the root doctor in some town in Georgia where she’d fed white sawmill workers turpentine when they’d got syphilis; or about her mother, the young maid, who’d been raped by her employer’s son the first week on the job; or about how the young man’s family had felt so sorry they’d eventually sent Grandma away to school in New York—Abel’s eyes glazed over.

  Over-told stories of vanished civilizations did not interest him. Grandma’s quibble with Sammie, couched as it was in history, was brushed aside as an insufficient obstacle.

  Abel married Samantha at a wedding chapel down on Music Row. There was no budging Grandma. And no budging Abel. The wedding took place at noon.

  Her parents out of their stage clothes in their Sunday best were presentable: dear, intelligent, curious. They had raised their only daughter vaguely in the southern suburbs when the land had still been the out-acres of played-out and broken-down, poor southern towns, then fancy suburbs, surrounded by cousins. The brothers and their wives and her cousins, were, thought Abel, decidedly NOCD.

  Samantha and her female cousins had grown up bored and drunk and flirting with any man who looked like he would carry them away from bored and drunk and suburban.

  One of the brothers lived in a big house in Decatur out on Wheeler Lake. After the band broke up he had gone to the University of Alabama, majored in mechanical engineering, and gotten a job in Huntsville. The third of the triplets lived in Ardmore, within walking distance of Samantha. He was an electrician.

  All summer long the electrician’s wife kept three inflatable kiddie pools inflated, two on the back lawn and one on the porch. The one on the porch contained ice, beers, and wine coolers. One of the two pools on the lawn usually contained splashing children. The other usually contained Abel’s electrician brother-in-law-to-be, watching the splashing children while downing adult beverages.

  The attendants were Samantha’s sisters-in-law and Abel’s son. Her four boys, in jeans and red checkered shirts, sang “I’ve Got a Never Ending Love for You” as the crowd gathered. Grandma hated to see Ajay, the youngest in the group, squashed under and surrounded by trash. Raised as she had been inside the walls of a decaying plantation house, a petted and pitied high-yellow house servant hired to brush an old white woman’s hair, Grandma had been carefully trained, by ladies propped up high by invisible distinctions, to distinguish between different shades of white.

  There was too much white southern lady blood and too much persecuted slave blood in Grandma for the lady not to wonder whether these new people were trash, or hippies, or hippie trash.

  When she was young, Grandma could tell trash, dressed up or costume covered, just as easily as she had been able to recognize the lightest-light-skinned Negro. Since about 1970 it had become hard to tell who was who, black or white.

  She knew in her heart God didn’t love her so much that he’d have to chastise her so hard as to make these new relations hippie trash. Hippie trash was the worst of all.

  There was one simple but real consolation. Grandma was glad the new wife’s sons weren’t near as handsome as Ajay. That was the good part.

  Grandma was also glad the boys were short and scrawny. She hoped they were short enough. She would not bother to learn their names. Their shirttails were out and their shoes were dirty and their hair was unkempt. The grandson was making a mistake. Abel believed he would make of this woman a servant. Grandma was not so sure.

  Already Sammie had succeeded in insisting that both she and Abel transfer to jobs in Huntsville (she from Washington, he from Nashville) and start married life together in Alabama, explaining she wanted her boys to go to the University of Alabama and she wanted them to go cheap. Saying she wanted her children to know and to love the state where she was born and raised, Samantha, in one fell swoop, got Abel away from Washing-ton women and Nashville black folk.

  When the bride entered, carry ing a carefully trimmed bouquet of crimson grocery-store roses, Samantha’s parents beamed.

  Her two sisters-in-law held hands, crying softly, each absolutely overwhelmed by how much their husband’s sister was willing to sacrifice to provide for her four children. She was a good mama.

  Silently, her brothers cursed Sammie’s first husband, the college football quarterback, for dying. Then, again silently, they cursed their sister for bringing the family to this strange wedding with strange black people. They’d liked it better when they hadn’t known there were any rich blacks except in sports and on teevee. The only black person they wanted to know personally was Curtis Lowe.

  Leaning against the back wall of the wedding chapel, the electrician brother was chastising himself for not having killed Sammie’s first husband or her second husband before they were the first or second husband.

  Then he remembered there hadn’t been a moment he had known she was going to marry either man before he’d known she’d been knocked up with the man’s baby.

  Sammie got engaged the old-fashioned way. The electrician shook his head. He checked his watch. The longest two minutes in the history of his world had just passed. He wasn’t killing his unborn niece or nephew’s daddy. No matter what. Hell, come this summer I’m gonna be sitting in a blow-up baby pool drinking beer with a colored dude. The only good thing about it, the electrician could figure, was that the colored dude pretty much just looked like a white guy, except maybe a Jewish white guy, with a tan.

  The bride and groom exchanged vows. Samantha’s parents sang a cleaned-up version of “Willin’.” Her boys shuffled and kicked and whispered, ignoring the hand their mother put on their shoulders.

  Grandma had to sit down. She was carried back to plaster-wall Georgia, to sudden knowledge, to an understanding that when this many white people get together in a house, the black folk are working for them. Grandma wanted to faint.

  Sammie’s sons continued to fidget and whisper, oblivious to the scowls directed at them. This didn’t worry or irritate Abel. There was no one in attendance it embarrassed him to have see the boys’ misbehavior. Only immediate family was present. He would teach the boys better and soon enough.

  ***

  “Did you come to the wedding?”

  “Phoebe came. I’ve started to collect old American advertisements. Phoebe Redmund, Abe
l’s cousin, is my primary dealer. Phoebe fills me in.”

  “Has anyone ever told you you have boundary issues?”

  “Where shall we go next?”

  “You tell me.”

  “The Islamic Center.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE MOSQUE LOOKED stranded. Nearby houses and hedges were just beginning to be decorated with white lights. On three different lawns inflated snowmen stood sentry. On another an inflated giant snow globe glowed. Christmas trees, fake and real, foil and green, were in almost every window. Atop each indoor tree was a star placed to celebrate the bright light that guided wise men to a baby.

  What Hope considered to be the first big mosque in Nashville stood on Twelfth Avenue. On Fridays the mosque hosted a market: black olives, pita bread, falafel. But mainly it offered conversation and a rapidly growing community. This was a Tuesday. The neighborhood anchored by Corner Music and by Katy K’s Ranch Dressing, a vintage clothing shop, looked like what it was: a boho-honky-tonk-cool subset of gritty American.

  As she searched for an always-hard-to-find parking space in the quirky South Nashville neighborhood, Hope tortured Nicholas by crooning along with Merle Haggard, who was declaring, “If we make it through December everything’s gonna be all right I know,” an earnest promise that sounded false.

  By the time she was squaring up to wedge her MINI Cooper between two gigantic Suburbans into a nonexistent space, Chrissie Hynde was harmonizing with the Blind Boys of Alabama, “in the bleak midwinter, a long, long time ago.” Abel would have liked that one. He’d loved the Pretenders. Nicholas joined in when Hope and Chrissie added their voices to Clarence Fountain’s, Jimmy Carter’s, and George Scott’s when they got to the words “Hear me.”

  Hope didn’t care to or dare go into the mosque. To enter so close to Abel’s death, hyper-Christian promise keeper that he had become, seemed both disrespectful and dangerous. Nicholas went in alone, leaving Hope to wander the seasonally expectant streets.

  After Nicholas disappeared inside the yellow brick building, Hope invited the ghost of Abel to wander with her. The ghost did not appear. She was sorry. Abel knew, and would tell anyone who would listen, that there was no greater joy than being a black child at Christmas. When he had told Hope that, he had expected her to chime in harmoniously; he had been certain that she would know what he meant. But she had held silent. She had kinda-sorta known what he meant, but because she had read a lot, not because she had had any personal experience of what it was to be what Abel had drunkenly and repeatedly called “the good hope of a bad people.”

  Or had he said best hope of a plagued people? She was beginning to forget the details—but she remembered this: when Abel talked like that she tasted some of what she imagined her mother’s life to have been before her marriage.

  Both her mother and her first husband had been campus kids who had grown up in the immediate vicinity of black colleges. A sense of what Hope’s mother’s life had been during her girlhood, before her marriage to Mad Morgan, was one of the things Abel had brought to Hope. A better thing was a sense of what it was to be a black child at Christmas. Abel had given Hope that when he had given her Ajay.

  She would remember this as the year she and her son were twinned by the isolating sorrow and rage of precipitous father loss. It would be her second unmitigatedly sad Christmas, unless they mitigated the sadness with anger.

  “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” That was the song played at Abel’s funeral that had made sense. And it was the song that had made Hope saddest. Walking through the neighborhood surrounding the Islamic Center and mosque, Hope couldn’t avoid knowing how some of the neighbors would have offended her ex-husband. He would have loathed the dusky faces and dusky eyes, but most he would have hated the sounds and sights of the Muslim call to prayer.

  As she walked around the periphery of Christmas and the Confederacy and the Nashville Islamic Center, all of it wrapped up together and placed in stark relief for Hope how peculiarly religious Abel had become.

  When Hope had first known Abel in college he had claimed to be a Buddhist and officially been a Baptist; he had barely tolerated being married in a church. Before their wedding, at Hope’s prodding, he had taken a course to be welcomed into the Episcopal Church. At the end he hadn’t wanted to change denominations. He hadn’t believed enough to warrant a change. He had remained a Baptist, baptized, who claimed Buddhism as an inspiration. But somehow he had died claiming to be, and claimed by, an evangelical Christianity.

  ***

  She had gotten up from her bed in the earliest, shortest hours of Tuesday morning to do an Internet search for an article she had vaguely remembered. She loved Google. The article that twenty years earlier had taken Abel days to find and hours to copy, feeding coins into a slot at the Library of Congress, she had retrieved and printed in a matter of minutes.

  She pulled out the little notebook she kept in her purse where she had made her notes and read, “From the Fall of 1862 until the last days of the civil war, religious revivalism swept through Confederate forces with an intensity that led one southerner to declare the armies had been ‘nearly converted into churches.’ ”

  According to Drew Faust, southerners were long and peculiarly experienced in defining their political cause as godly and discussing war in terms of God.

  A fact Faust had unearthed that had intrigued Abel and had bored Hope was that “nearly two hundred million pages of tracts were distributed to soldiers during the war.” Abel had been impatient when he had explained to Hope that the tracts Faust referred to had been printed sermons. “They were something like Lauro’s,” Abel had said.

  In Abel-speak, what did it mean to fly away? To die? To escape? To escape by dying? How did he tie the Italian experience to his Dixie memory? Hope wished she had taken the little plane from Abel’s bedroom.

  She was starting to think of her ex-husband as a modern-day black Confederate. And she was wondering if she shouldn’t stop. Hope had been born with a good memory. Brief, intensive, state-paid training had made it great. Nevertheless, there was something Faust had written near the end of the article Hope had read that she wanted to remember but already couldn’t.

  She willed her mind slack and it came back to her. Deserting soldiers had been punished with “thirty-nine lashes and a brand on the cheek.” That was the fact that had intrigued Hope and Abel at the time they had first read Faust’s article. Abel had been visibly disturbed by the fury and frustration provoked when white deserters, as reported by Faust, had been punished exactly in the manner of runaway slaves.

  Abel had experienced a complex fury and frustration of his own when confronted with “thirty-nine lashes and a brand on the cheek.” It stole something from the slaves. It branded their boldness cowardice, even as it stole something from the white men’s identities. The Thirty-Nine Steps. They had read aloud to each other Buchan’s 1915 “shocker” during their early days in Manila. Thirty-nine lashes and a brand on the cheek. Had Abel translated that indignity into new sets of gestures, gestures he could misuse at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib?

  The only tools she could quickly grab to use against that possible reality were ignorance, lies, and the special kind of lie that is storytelling. And they were barely enough after having seen those photographs on Abel’s table.

  She and Abel had met a couple in the Philippines, a black tandem couple, the Winters, a beautiful couple, who had allowed Hope to attempt to sculpt them in exchange for the pieces. The Winters had wanted to be immortalized in a spy movie. Hope had distracted them while they sat for her by making up an elaborate Hansel and Gretel spy story, about a man who left a trail that could be followed only by the woman who loved him.

  The hero in her story had been a rogue Foreign Service officer who avenged people who had been tortured by torturing their tormentors. She had developed her character by crossing the Winters with an urban legend she had first encountered in Manila, the legend of Fearless Laurel.

  This was the kin
d of tale that was told over the heel of a bottle in the middle of the night. The kind of tale that was spoken in whispers by drunks to drunks.

  Fearless Laurel. The first part of the story was always the evolution of his name. Over time, in cells throughout the world, Fearless Laurel had been shortened to FL. After that, eventually, he had started to be called Florida, first in a small house in a South American city, but the nickname had stuck and had traveled. The three little syllables had made it around the world. Florida. Those three beats made it possible for men and women who were being tortured to alter the balance of power— if not the hour of their death. They could call out, “Florida!” It was a promise that someone, Florida, FL, Fearless Laurel, would come to torment the tormentor.

  Florida. After those three syllables were whispered, shouted, spat, or even mumbled, the fear was never just on one side.

  Stories swirled in the quarter-world of spies, spymasters, operatives, contractors, and international crazies, the world of diamond merchants, oil merchants, and arms merchants, and of do-gooding NGO runners: of flayings and faggings, of peelings and proddings, of brandings and beatings almost beyond telling.

  Fearless Laurel afflicted people not for plea sure or gain but for vengeance, deterrence, and solace. He offered each and every anonymous victim in each and every anonymous cell, room, or basement the joy of knowing that each and every anonymous tormentor had reason to wonder if what he or she was doing, what he or she was about to do, would be done back to him or her and worse. Florida. Three little syllables that kept minds from breaking even as bones crick-cracked.

  When Hope first heard the story she dismissed it completely as an urban legend. Then one night in a zouk in Martinique it was told to her again by a man who swore he knew someone Fearless Laurel had nearly killed. His own brother, and his brother had it coming. The young man in the zouk was ready to worship Fearless Laurel. Then he drank some more rum agricole and couldn’t say anything at all.