“Do you think Fearless really exists?” Hope had asked.
“I hope he does,” Abel had replied.
Hope wondered if before he had died Abel had feared that Fearless was coming for him. She sadly suspected Abel had exhausted himself creating variations on “thirty-nine lashes and a brand on the cheek.”
There was a line she wanted to remember that wasn’t coming back. To bring it back, Hope tried to imagine Abel reading the Faust article to her. Then she imagined herself quoting the missing line. The words returned: “Evangelical religion provided psychological reassurance to southern soldiers struggling with the daily threat of personal annihilation in its Christian promise of salvation and eternal life; conversion offered a special sort of consolation to the embattled Confederate.” Hope decided she would rather have Florida. She was that Hatfield. And Abel had preferred Christ. He was that southern.
***
Cold, and tired of walking, Hope returned to the car and turned on the heat. She was just beginning to thaw when Nicholas began pounding on the passenger window. Like a magician pronouncing, “Ta-da,” Nicholas announced, “Look who I found.”
Nicholas stood back to reveal the jolliest man Hope knew, Mo Henry. Mo came around to Hope’s side of the car as Nicholas moved toward the passenger side. When she rolled down the window he leaned in to kiss her.
“What are you doing here?” asked Hope.
“Coming to see you,” replied Mo.
“Getting in?” asked Hope.
“Running round to Sinbad’s. We can grab a coffee and something sweet.”
“Perfection,” said Nicholas, getting into Hope’s car. As Mo moved toward his car, Hope took her car out of park but did not take her foot off the brake.
“You ran into Mo Henry at the mosque?” asked Hope.
“We met at the funeral. I asked him to meet me here and introduce me to the imam,” said Nicholas.
“How do you really know Mo?” asked Hope.
“You don’t want to know,” said Nicholas.
“Yes, I do,” said Hope.
She took her foot off the brake. She never stayed tired or furious long. Nicholas put his hand on her knee, stroking across the bone as he had done years earlier, only then her knee had been naked. Through the nylon of the stockings and the wool of the pants she felt the call of old times. The old man made her feel like a younger woman. “Don’t you feel my leg, don’t you feel my leg, ’cause if you feel my leg, you’ll want to feel my thigh, if you feel my thigh, you’re gonna get a surprise, don’t you feel my leg,” sang Hope.
“Blue Lu Barker,” said Nicholas.
“You know everything,” said Hope.
“Yes, I do,” said Nicholas.
It is hard not to like a man who knows that Blue Lu Barker sung “Don’t You Make Me High” a half-century before Van Morrison, who remembered, or even knew about, Danny Barker, the jazz banjoist, even as she realized that he was romancing her, now as then, for purposes that had little to do with lust and even less to do with love, but had everything to do with staying amused during violent times in desperate places.
She launched into a peculiarly twangy “Things Have Gone to Pieces.” Singing loud about a faucet dripping in the kitchen and a picture falling down from a wall, getting fired and a lightbulb’s going out—singing a stone country song Nicholas couldn’t possibly like, she pushed him away with a smile. She didn’t want Nicholas getting a big head or bigger ideas.
TWENTY-TWO
HOPE DRANK WHAT she fondly called sweetened black silt but was otherwise known as Sinbad’s Turkish coffee, hoping Ajay and Waycross, somewhere in the far North, were finding their way to having the time they needed.
Sinbad’s is in a little strip of restaurants and shops across from Belmont University, a Baptist college famous for its music business program. Situated at the corner of “Baptists don’t believe in drinking” and “Beer is a food group,” the neighborhood had a charm born of geographic irony.
Sandwiched between the round and brown Mo and the skinny and silver Nicholas, it was impossible not to realize Mo and Nicholas had each appealed to an opposite pole of Abel’s identity. Mo had appealed to Abel’s old-timey black servant self; Nicholas had inhabited and inspired all Abel’s dreams of double-zero-seven cosmopolitan spydom.
Mo was both what Abel had longed to leave behind and the best of Abel—a sense of tradition and the capacity to be loyal. Nicholas was what Abel had longed to attain— unbridled power—and Abel’s shallowest love of shimmer, international tailoring of the most complex sort.
Abel had failed in both directions and he had triumphed in both directions. It occurred to Hope that she too was reaching for some part of Abel she didn’t know, that she had hoped to know better, but now never would, unless she gleaned something essential from the memories of these men. They were the poles Abel had connected just before vanishing.
Nicholas tucked into his second diamond of baklava. Mo was eating hummus and drinking a Coke while he waited for a falafel sandwich. Hope’s attention drifted to the street and across it to Abel’s favorite Nashville restaurant.
The International Market, directly across from where Hope was sitting, now vaguely swabbing a dab of Mo’s hummus onto a torn triangle of pita, had sustained a generation of aspiring singers, fading stars, students, and other near-homeless people; but Hope had never gone there. Abel had frequented the place, making it too likely a venue for a chance encounter with a difficult ex-husband. He had said it reminded him of Manila. He had said he appreciated the tastiness of Styrofoam takeaway containers filled up with noodles and broccoli and rice (cooked Thai, Chinese, and Viet namese style) from the International Market steam table.
Hope wondered if the waiter now bringing her second cup of coffee and Mo’s falafel—one of four waiters wearing black pants and white shirts and looking distinctly Middle Eastern as they moved about the room—was from the Kurdish part of Iraq.
Knowing that most of the seven thousand Kurds in Nashville came from Iraq, she thought it would be a very good guess. As she started to let herself get pulled back to half listening to the jerky conversation, part hide-and-seek, part tug-of-war, going on between Nicholas and Mo, it seemed to Hope that both men were doing exactly what she was doing: reaching for some part of Abel they didn’t know, that they had hoped to know better, but now never would, unless they discovered the missing part at this table.
Mo was teasing Nicholas about not heading over to Little Kurdistan. Nicholas gibed back with faux acknowledgment that he might just be a little conspicuous. They agreed that one of Abel’s great advantages in the life he had chosen had been his chameleon face. He could have been anything. White, black, Jewish, Arab. Hispanic. People had mistaken him constantly for everything but Asian, and wearing a barong Tagalog he had been, on more than one occasion, mistaken for Filipino.
With Nashville having been designated an official Iraqi voting location ( just like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles),Abel’s little band of mourners agreed a significant change was taking place in the geopolitics of the American South. It was not an exaggeration to say that Nashville was a focus of attention in the Kurdish world. As Iraq prepared for the first open elections in fifty years, Iraqis everywhere were talking about how the Samir who had discovered Saddam Hussein hiding in a spider hole and punched him in the face had come to Nashville to register to vote. The gossip was smoke that patterned the walls of Sinbad’s.
Hope, Nicholas, and Mo each silently wished Abel had lived to see this day, the day somebody he loved recognized his—and Nashville’s— significance to the international scene. He had been in his last year of high school when the first of four big waves of Kurdish immigrants had hit Nashville in 1976 and the first fifty Kurds had been settled; he’d been back in Nashville, working as a banker and paying more attention than anybody had known, when, after Saddam had targeted Kurds working for nonprofits for extinction, the final of the four waves had hit in 1997.
Hope wonde
red if some of those folks had been spies in Iraq. Abel would have known. Abel had lived long enough and weird enough to coin the phrase Hope and Nicholas and Mo had all in their time quoted: “The Cumberland is a river in the Middle East.”
“What if Abel saved more lives than he stole?”
“How much would that justify?”
“There are people in this restaurant Abel saved from dying?”
“Which people?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
Mo was gesturing to Hope to take the last bite of hummus. She appreciated his good manners. And she appreciated a fact Abel would have appreciated: his little town had become an inter-national power and he was a part of making it so. She suspected the Cumberland was not merely a river in the Middle East, but that the Cumberland was an important river in the Middle East.
“Why did Abel leave Huntsville?”
No one answered her. The conversation veered back to the personal. Hope was surprised to hear Mo and Nicholas ragging on each other by throwing pithy Abel put-downs. She was surprised that Abel had told Nicholas and Mo so much about each other. She would have thought Abel would have feared Mo would find Nicholas too fey and Nicholas would find Mo too servile. She would have thought wrong.
Nicholas was feeling comfortable enough to venture aloud a theory he expected Hope would find silly. He wanted to gauge Mo’s reaction. Nicholas raised the possibility that Abel wasn’t dead, that Abel was in some kind of international witness protection program, or self-generated exile. Mo was sure Abel was dead.
“I saw the body,” said Mo.
“And you are absolutely sure it was him?” asked Nicholas.
“Changed, but yeah. I’ve known Abel since he was a gleam in his daddy’s eye,” said Mo.
“Were you surprised he went to the Rebel Yell?” asked Nicholas.
“Very,” said Mo.
“Do you think it was some kind of signal?” asked Hope.
“I think it was suicide,” said Mo.
“Suicide,” repeated Nicholas.
“I think he wanted to die. He couldn’t stand living with Sammie anymore. He knew his choices were hard on Ajay. Maybe too hard on Ajay,” said Mo.
“Change the subject,” said Hope.
“Abel said you knew more about Hope than anybody, because you knew her family from back in West Virginia,” said Nicholas.
“I dated one of the aunts,” said Mo.
“Did I know that?” asked Hope.
“No,” said Mo.
“Did you know my mother?” asked Hope.
“Everybody brown who passed through the state of West Virginia back in the day knew, or knew of, Canary, and that’s a story for a bar and a bourbon,” said Mo.
“Unh-unh. You owe me after dropping the ‘death by self-inflicted horse barn’ bomb,” said Hope.
“I’ll tell you, but it’s time to change venues.”
“The wake cycles back,” said Nicholas.
Hope was checking her watch as Mo started sing-talking “make it a Hurricane before I go insane, it’s five o’clock somewhere.” Nicholas laughed and started singing along. Hope joined in too. In the last year, “Five o’clock Somewhere” had become a favorite song of Abel’s. They, the only three people in the world who knew this odd fact, were a cadre.
As she drove from Belmont Boulevard toward downtown, Nicholas told Hope that Mo was some kind of homeland security officer or operative. Hope almost believed Nicholas.
TWENTY-THREE
THEY WERE ENVELOPED by the Oak Bar’s green couches, Hope and Nicholas sharing one and Mo across from them, bourbon in hand, on the other. Nicholas was in possession of a martini; Hope, a glass of red wine. They were settling in for the duration.
Spinning the history to become a suitable grown-up cocktail-time story of a pilgrim’s tale, Mo began, “I dated this gal, up in Washington, distantly kin to you and Canary, met her on the Oak Bluffs tennis courts, but that’s a different story. That gal took me to a party where I hooked up with one of the aunts, Grace.”
“Aunt Sweet.”
“Yeah, Aunt Sweet.”
Canary Morgan came back to the mountain with a belly full of baby and no new name. The town was dazed. Their predictions had been precisely right and completely wrong. When any Negro from anywhere near around Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, remembered 1951 that’s how they remembered it.
When the belle of the town had rejected the local colored college, Storer, in favor of the flat cornfields of Oberlin, Ohio, colored Harper’s Ferry had vaticinated, almost in one voice, “That chile be knocked up by some white boy and home before two semesters get good and gone.”
Colored Harper’s Ferry was tight braided to the college. Canary’s parents, Charles and Emmaline Morgan, excepted, nobody at the college understood why anyone needed to leave the prettiest spot on earth to get an education.
According to the wisdom conventional on the campus as 1951 turned into 1952, to enroll a pretty Negro girl in a white college or university was to invite trouble.
“If she is to go away, she should go to Howard,” said Emma-line’s best friend, the chair of Howard’s Women’s Department. The unspoken implication being that if Canary was to go away she should go to the best and closest place—as long as it was a Negro place.
The decision to send Canary to a white school in Ohio had been community business. And community sorrow. All the dark folk of Harper’s Ferry, including Canary’s parents, had started missing the girl just as soon as she had started receiving thick envelopes with postmarks from the glamorous world— from towns called Cambridge and Bryn Mawr and Wellesley— addressed to the girl’s certificate name, Mary Hope.
Mary Hope had been born with two pale eyes, milky skin, and bald. The day of her birth the midwife had laughed at her infant pinkness, reassuring Emmaline, her young mother, that the brown would come in within the week. Then it hadn’t. Her skin had stayed light and one blue eye had turned brown.
She could tell things. That was hard on her daddy, who was a man of science, and easy on everyone else. By the time she turned nine the entire town was convinced that her one brown eye was just God’s way of signing his best work.
There wasn’t a pair of ears that could still hear that didn’t listen out for the sound of her song; the town counted on her to tell them today what would happen tomorrow, at least the important things.
When she got quiet, trouble was on the way. That’s how she came to be called Canary. She knew when the weather would get bad; she knew when the sickness would be coming; she could tell when the white folks’ mood was going to change.
Mainly she sang sweet and hot from morning till night—her own songs and pop songs, “Honeysuckle Rose” and “You Are My Sunshine,” that migrated to the mountains with the bands who came to entertain and fleece the miners black and white— except when she was talking or laughing. And sometimes she stopped. Just like a canary in a coal mine, she was.
The happily noisy child grew to be a beautiful noisier woman; there wasn’t much trouble that came to the town. The old folks said she was a second sun in the sky except on hot days; on hot days she was a cool breeze.
A few who imagined the possibility of a larger world meeting Negro Harper’s Ferry by meeting Canary contemplated with plea sure the idea of her going to school at one of the Seven Sisters. These folk welcomed the big envelopes with applications for admission from Radcliffe and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. Girls’ schools. Academic convents, well and long organized to keep boys at bay.
The town had a special appreciation of Mount Holyoke, both for its geographic isolation in mountainous western Massachusetts and for its place in colored history as the first of the Seven Sisters to enroll an American girl of color.
That all ended when she started talking about Oberlin. When an envelope from an institution that enrolled white boys appeared in the Harper’s Ferry post office, all support for any white school vanished.
Since just before the Secon
d World War, coal land had been hemorrhaging colored men. The town needed Canary to lure a black boy back to it or to hug one tight from leaving. If colored Harper’s Ferry were to survive it would be as a son-in-laws town. Canary’s beauty and Canary’s charm were a significant community resource.
Canary just knew she was getting bored having a whole town love her in general and no one love her in particular. She wasn’t willing to wait for someone who might come to town, particularly when she heard daily gossip that the colored college might be closing soon.
She could defend her ambitions but she knew she’d only make matters worse and folk would call it backtalking.
And everybody she wanted to argue with knew the same facts she did: Oberlin was the first college in the country to accept Negro students, the one that was accepting us before the Civil War; Oberlin had been enrolling Negro students in 1837 and Storer hadn’t even been founded until 1867; and last but not least to her or them, Oberlin had been stop ninety-nine on the Underground Railroad. Canary and the town knew the same facts—but she had seen something that had caused her to weight the facts differently.
Or rather, she had seen somebody. In Martinsburg shopping with her mother one Saturday afternoon she had caught a glimpse of male prettiness laughing, an unworried power, Mad Morgan in an Oberlin letterman jacket, leaning against a Jaguar XK-120. It had been enough to make her start chasing after the future— not waiting on the future to come to her.
And so she had gone away to the white school. Cold days were colder and hot days too hot at Storer.
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