Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  Clementine Hope drove the aunts north. The old ladies spread out in the backseat of the little blue Volvo station wagon that Hope had insisted they purchase, and the Duster was left behind.

  Hope had the front seat and the radio to herself. After the four hours it took to get to New York, they stopped and ate at Sylvia’s in Harlem. Four hours after that they were in Boston, where they ate at Bob the Chef’s on Commonwealth Avenue. Two hours after that they hit the ferry port at Woods Hole.

  ***

  For Clementine Hope the simple pleasures of the Vineyard, like the simple pleasures of life, were few. Clementine had spent way too much time living wild in West Virginia to readily pass for conventional anything. And her worlds kept colliding. She ran into friends from St. Paul’s at an ice cream shop. They wanted to join her on Inkwell Beach, the gathering spot for black kids. She reluctantly issued an invitation. The presence of the white friends from St. Paul’s did nothing to enhance Hope’s social cachet with the black kids until one of the Milleville friends whisperingly declared her Oak Bluffs friends to be “horrible snobs.” When Hope said, sounding just like the aunts, very loudly, “That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” everybody, black and white, laughed.

  The aunts did a better impersonation of typical brown Vineyard people than Hope did. They wore pale cotton clothes, pearls, and espadrilles. They boasted about their child’s SAT scores and worried aloud about the relative merits of Howard and Harvard. They fit in because they were all about family and genealogy and because they were tired and obviously grateful for a cool place in the sun. And they were pretty in a coral and bronze kitchen-beautician Revlon makeup kind of way. If they had not come of age on some historically black college campus or another, or on a Seven Sister, Ivy, or Little Ivy campus, or even on the dreaded campus of Oberlin, they had come of age working for doctors’ wives in a city where the families of physicians were aristocrats. They knew how to do, from years of helping those other people’s families do. And they did what they knew because they thought it would help their grandniece Clementine Hope.

  On the ferry to the island they even started calling her, and insisted that she call herself, just Hope. Clementine and Clementine Hope sounded too country.

  Hope’s living on the island wasn’t easy until at Larsons, the lobster place, she ran into a white boy from school, a D.C. boy she had expected to be in touch with earlier in the summer— except he had headed directly from school to Chilmark. Or so he had said. Later he confessed he hadn’t wanted to see Hope on U Street.

  After that most afternoons she pointed the blue Volvo up island and spent a few hours with her classmate in a guesthouse converted from a barn. Some mornings she would rise and pick him up before anyone in her house was awake and they would drive out to the very tip of the island and eat breakfast on a deck hanging off a cliff overlooking the ocean, hoping for a James Taylor sighting.

  Sometimes while eating breakfast at the cliffs they ran into friends from New York. All the New York kids wanted to talk about was it being the Summer of Sam. Hope hadn’t heard much about that because even rich kids didn’t call long-distance often in the seventies and black Washington wasn’t worried about the white girl–killer. Over blueberry pancakes on the cliffs, someone told her this was one summer she was really lucky being black. Thinking about playing kitchen beautician and long gossipy family stories, Hope agreed.

  Their party, a barbecue, was held on the Wednesday before Labor Day. Everything conspired to have it be well attended. The aroma of the aunts’ cooking allured. Senator Ed Brooke,America’s only black senator, was on his way over, Benetta Washing-ton, wife of D.C.’s first black mayor, having called him four times earlier in the day to gossip and to remind him of the engagement. It was fun to have a new party given by new people. And the house they had rented was fabulous, right in the thick of Cottager life, newly decorated with tasteful furniture funded by the exorbitant rent the aunts were paying.

  The aunts had a good time. Hope had something else. One of the families brought a daughter who attended Exeter. The girl, having been in Germany for the summer, had only just arrived on the island the night before the party. Her name was Victoria— after the queen, she said—and she looked like Dorothy Dan-dridge, or so the aunts said. Victoria wanted to know if Hope was in the Jack and Jill. Victoria made jokes about having to help serve at Link functions and didn’t understand when Hope didn’t understand the jokes. She said, “The whole thing,” referring to the aunts’ party, “might as well be a united meeting of the Boule and the Links and the Girlfriends and the Circle-lets with a Carousel or two thrown in.”

  Hope had only half a hold on what this lithe brown girl— who, to add insult to injury, was wearing the exact same Lilly skirt she was except two sizes smaller—was talking about. The little clique surrounding her, all wearing perfect Lilly Pulitzer tennis skirts and twinsets and carrying Coach bags, seemed to share a secret handshake to go with their tiny diamond tennis bracelets and their fancy dialect that was even more exclusive than St. Paul’s slang. And far more beautiful. She loved the funny words and phrases—bougie, copacetic, fathom, hincty— that she added to the jargon she already knew: heifer, trifling, home training, no half-doer. She loved the drawn-out syllables, the sentences that swirled on and on and back on each other, traveling up and down a musical scale, peppered with frequent allusions from and to the King James Bible. Just as she had heard Italian and had known she wanted to speak it—not the first time she’d heard it but the first time she’d heard it spoken in a certain Fellini film— she first heard Bougie Black spoken by Victoria in Oak Bluffs and she wished she could speak it fluently, speak it as Victoria spoke it, just as she wished she could wear Lilly like Victoria wore it.

  It amazed her that all the exact same Lilly pieces that she had known in St. Paul’s could be worn so differently in Oak Bluffs. She had been trying to pull her worlds together all summer. And just as all the various constituencies seemed to be reconciled in the person of Vineyard Victoria, they began to fly apart.

  The boy from the carousel arrived at the party. She heard someone say his name was Abel Jones the third. She heard someone else say he was going with Victoria.

  Hope took a wrong step. Someone meaning no harm asked her what the aunts did. When she told them they had a catering company, one of the girls sneered. So Hope told them the rest of the truth: that her aunts were retired maids. The bossy-glossy brown girls closed ranks against her—the arriviste with a mess on her head who didn’t wear her Lilly right— against Clemen-tine Hope Morgan. When Victoria made a face like she had just smelled something awful, Hope hauled off and slapped her.

  “No home training.”

  “How do we even know these people?”

  “We don’t.”

  Most of the crowd was too drunk to care, but those who weren’t, particularly those with daughters or sons near the wild child’s age, turned on their heels and left. Eventually, Ed Brooke left too, wondering what in the world Benetta had gotten him into.

  And so the summer she spent ostensibly learning to make pie but in reality trying to learn to be black— and part of that was simply learning to be afraid of the same things the aunts were afraid of: a fear of missing underpants, a fear of being hit by a car and having it discovered you are wearing a bra and panties that don’t match, a fear of unshod feet that left women suffering in stockings in the summertime, a fear of being accused of having no home training or of providing irregular home training—ended in a kind of colossal failure.

  Hope had no home training and she didn’t care if the world knew it. And she would be accepted as a black girl or die trying to be—probably wearing no underpants at all.

  She hadn’t known why she was doing it when she was doing it, but before the hot wore off her hand Hope knew her second-best reason for having slapped Victoria was that the girl was in full and flamboyant possession of things Hope wanted for herself, most particularly Abel Jones the third, the boy she had seen on
the carousel.

  As the ferry pulled out of Vineyard Haven, taking Hope and the aunts back to the mainland, Hope was thinking about what diet she should go on. By the time they reached Woods Hole she had started imagining her life after St. Paul’s, her life at Radcliffe, very, very differently than she had imagined it before. She would let her hair grow long and she would straighten it. While the aunts ate Sylvia’s sweet potato pie, Hope drank hot black coffee. They all agreed they didn’t need to do that, go to the Vineyard, again, or at least not anytime soon.

  The water had turned cold. It was time for Hope to get out of the bath.

  TWENTY-SIX

  NICHOLAS WAS WAITING for Hope in the lobby of the Hermitage, sitting beneath the ornate stained-glass ceiling, martini glass in hand. Having changed out of his country-and-western attire, he now was wearing black cashmere sweatpants and sweatshirt, black velvet loafers, and a bottle-green smoking jacket with deeper green toggles.

  As Hope approached, wearing a black cashmere wrap dress, her workhorse Chanel black ballerina flats, and Wolford tights, she could see that Nicholas’s jacket looked old enough to have been worn by Nicholas’s grandfather in a withdrawing room when Victoria still sat on the throne.

  “Great minds think alike,” said Nicholas.

  “Fools seldom differ,” countered Hope.

  This time instead of kissing him on both cheeks and one cheek twice, she kissed him on the lips and then on a cheek. The aging-dandy smell was gone, replaced by something less familiar.

  “Jicky?” asked Hope.

  “You remember,” said Nicholas.

  “I remember,” said Hope.

  “I like your new scent,” said Nicholas.

  “I’m not wearing any,” said Hope.

  “The scent of the skin of your neck,” said Nicholas.

  As they made their way down the steps to the dining room, she was surprised to feel how much weight he was leaning on her. She couldn’t tell if it was gin or age.

  “New or new and improved?” asked Hope.

  “And improved,” said Nicholas.

  Hope rewarded him with a kiss, linked her arm into his to give him more support, then started moving, more slowly, down the stairs.

  They flirted through dinner, aimlessly, speaking of meals they had eaten and people they knew; how skinny she had been, how round (and radiant, Nicholas added) she had gotten almost as soon as she’d become pregnant; how he had finally gotten to go to Moscow; and how she had finally gotten to go to St. Petersburg. They discovered that they still had the same favorite food movie, Tampopo, and that both had added Babette’s Feast and Big Night to make a list.

  When the coffee was served Nicholas told the waiter to leave the silver-plated urn on the table, fill the water glasses, then leave them alone until he waved a napkin.

  “So tell me the rest of the story,” said Nicholas.

  “There’s no more to tell,” said Hope.

  “The aunts,” said Nicholas.

  “The aunts are mine,” said Hope.

  “I have a story to tell you. There was an unforgettable birthday party,” said Nicholas.

  “You mean when the Klan burned a cross on his lawn on his thirteenth birthday?” asked Hope.

  “The Klan was the least of it,” said Nicholas.

  Abel felt gypped. It was his thirteenth birthday and it was a Saturday. He preferred it when his birthday fell on a school day. Then he got a party at school and a party on the weekend, cookies as well as a cake. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were the days to have a birthday.

  Opelika, Mount Bayou, Yazoo City, and Waycross knew all of this. Ever since the four medical students had arrived, in a caravan of polished cars loaded down with copious stuff, and had moved into a rented house around the corner from Meharry Medical College and down the street from the home of the Abel Joneses, the kid had carried his complaints up the street to their blacktop.

  On this morning he had brought his complaints into their kitchen. The smell of fried bologna and hot sauce mingled with the smell of coffee. Plates shared place with textbooks on the crowded chrome and Formica ice-green dinette table. Abel slumped in a corner drinking hot, milky coffee from a turquoise Melmac cup into which he had poured four spoons of sugar before a large brown hand had slapped his smaller beige hand away. Abel had just laughed, then started gulping down the coffee.

  “You just make sure you come to my party,” pleaded Abel.

  “Why you think we up here before day hittin’ the books?” asked Opelika.

  “ ’Cause you goin’ out with nurses to night?” teased Abel.

  “ ’Fore long we be taking you with us, little man,” said Mount Bayou.

  “Thirteen is more’n half grown,” said Waycross, before grunting like he was remembering something and then cutting his eye back to his chemistry textbook.

  Abel put his dirty cup in the sink.

  “Your mama live here, boy?” asked Yazoo City.

  “No, sir,” the boy replied. Everybody laughed. Yazoo City sounded just like an old man when he scolded.

  “Just bring my presents,” said Abel, before stopping to wash and dry the cup and slip it into the plastic dish rack.

  “What makes you think we got you anything?” said Way-cross, not bothering to look up from his textbook.

  “I know y’all,” said Abel.

  Abel snatched another piece of fried bologna, got his hand slapped again, by Opelika, and was out their back screen door.

  Four dark men dressed in light-green scrubs, shooting hoops in back of a little Victorian cottage that had survived long enough to find itself standing in the vicinity of Meharry Medical College’s twelve-story Hubbard Hospital, is an amiable scene.

  Opelika, Mount Bayou, Yazoo City, and Waycross were showboating for any ladies who might happen to see them from the other side of the chain-link fence that divided their backyard and the alley from the Meharry parking lot when they caught a whiff of something sweet: smoke.

  They’d been waiting for the stars to come out before dashing down the street for a piece of Abel’s thirteenth-birthday cake—when they inhaled the scent of smoke and thought of daddies and uncles and granddaddies. They thought of burning leaves, whole pigs roasting in sawed-open tin drums, and store-bought chicken parts grilling on poured-concrete patios; they thought of the South of their childhoods in the early fifties: gentle lives lived sharply circumscribed with prim surfaces.

  Recollecting their mothers running off to sorority conventions, their fathers with stethoscopes in their ears or black leather bags in their hands or paper masks across their faces, their families sitting in the first pew at church, and the gifts of preserved peaches and patchwork quilts and collard greens that had shown up on swept-clean back steps, they found themselves, for a moment, missing clapboard home-houses, far away from North Nashville and 1972.

  But only for a moment. The pride of Mount Bayou, Mississippi; the pride of Opelika, Alabama; the pride of Yazoo City, Mississippi; and the pride of Waycross, Georgia, would have four young social-workers-in-training eager to be Mrs. Doctor Somebody waiting for them in front of Jubilee Hall at precisely seven o’clock.

  The Fantastic Four, as they were also privately called by many a Fisk coed, did not plan to linger long at the kid’s party. They had places to be. They liked Nashville, Fisk, and Meharry med school; and Nashville, Meharry med school, and, perhaps most important, Fisk seemed to like them. One of Nashville’s prominent black citizens, Abel Jones himself, had invited them to attend a family party. This was a stark contrast to their recent experiences at Howard University.

  These scions of big black southern doctors had not found much welcome in Washington, D.C. The Fantastic Four had been perplexed fresh boys when they’d arrived at Howard in 1968.

  The matrons of black Washington society dreaded the “country-colored” undergrads, knew them “for certain” to be dangerous. The young men had felt the chill. Washington had seemed for these boys to be almost
a northern city; still they had swaggered even as the brown dowager-dragons had clucked. With their daddy-bought, all-cash-paid-for-Cadillac cars, these drenched-in-the-South Howard-ites could turn a government worker’s daughter’s head. Before you could say “Jack’s cat” a daughter could be folding baby diapers and reading novels behind the Cotton Curtain, dressing in silk to eat dinner with the very same Negro night after night—when he wasn’t called out to stitch up some nigger mess or white-folk folly, or to doctor one of God’s more taxing mysteries.

  As soon as they got their Howard degrees the Fantastic Four had refugeed south to Meharry, four singular decisions that had braided them into a brotherhood. When they had rented a house together it had seemed more than a suitable decision; it had seemed an inevitability. The four, each of whom had once known no one who was not black, and known no black person richer than himself, now knew each other.

  Mount Bayou made another basket. Waycross said that he hoped the new basketball they had bought Abel would make up for his birthday falling on a Saturday. Opelika opined that for sure the Nike Cortezes purchased to supplement Abel’s everyday Chuck Taylors “could make a grown man feel lucky.” They laughed anticipating Abel’s joy. Mount Bayou made another basket.

  Yazoo City got the rebound; Opelika fouled him. “Cain’t let Mississippi take over,”Waycross said, making the winning shot, a layup; then everybody agreed it was time to get down to the kid’s party.

  They dodged back into the rented house, grabbed the gifts (carefully wrapped in the colorful “funny pages” of the previous Sunday’s newspaper), then gulped down ice water from jelly glasses before they began making their way up the street.