The heat from the rising flames seemed to melt the freeze that had suspended the Fantastic Four. Opelika pulled off his jacket and started beating the blaze with it. His housemates followed suit in a misguided attempt to extinguish the flames that only managed to fan the fire.
Big Abel was struggling with the spigot on the outdoor water hose as one of the jackets exploded into flames. After what seemed like too long, the water started running, a half trickle out the nozzle, then spews, strange arcs, and splashes down the green length of the hose. It had been slashed. Get me some fuck-ing tape . . . no, get the hose from next door . . . no, don’t fucking call the police.
James and the boys from the neighborhood, all but Abel, unscrewed the hose from the house two doors down and dragged it right over to Big Abel. They knew from hot days playing hide-and-seek and war over and through the lawns and flower beds of their summer kingdom, slaking their thirst at any convenient tap or faucet, that the house next door had neither gardener nor hose.
Ben felt ashamed, ashamed of getting slapped, ashamed of being white, ashamed of standing out in the street in this neighborhood that was getting stranger by the moment. More than this he felt, without knowing what it was exactly he was feeling, the shame of all the dark, the pale-dark, and the hard-dark people around him; a shame intensified by the presence of a white witness to their humiliation.
Whoever had set the fire had had the good sense to rush off before it was discovered, before the police could be called, before their license plates could be written down. The perpetrators’ cowardice was the victims’ good fortune. It was a bad enough thing to see the cross. To have a white boy see you see it, to have a white boy laugh as you saw it, was a thing almost unbearable. Everybody on the lawn hated Abel for having invited the white boy to the party. Ben felt the shame and Abel felt the hate. A police car arrived and two white policemen got out.
“Shit.”
“Shit. Radio the fire department.”
The white policemen looked so calm and unperturbed, so uninvolved yet powerful, that they appeared to Abel to be stronger than all of the men running around angry and agitated. Mistaking their disinterest for courage, he ran to stand in the sheltering space he imagined between their two bodies. The larger of the two men lifted him into his arms and cradled him like a baby.
Ben walked around the cross, toward Abel, thinking the heat he felt on his cheek came from the fire or from his embarrassment. When he touched his face he felt the raised welts, the imprint of Big Abel’s palm. Ben wanted to vomit.
Everything was scary and strange: the whooping and crying of the women, the silent eyes of the men, Abel soiling himself. The policeman lifting Abel in his arms like he was a baby. Ben was ready to leave. He didn’t wait for his father. He just started walking. Ben, who considered Abel to be the first person he’d ever loved of his own free will and volition, had exhausted all of that love in a single evening. All he wanted was to be again who he had been that morning.
Abel wanted the same thing. Only he hated himself for wanting it. Ben and Abel had seen pictures of bodies hanging from trees and fiery crosses and people in white sheets with pointed hats. They knew what the Klan was from social studies class at school. In school it had seemed to both of them to be distant, horrible but distant, true but impossible, no scarier than a vampire in a horror movie. It wasn’t a fear they triumphed over; it was a fear they didn’t have. Abel wondered what it was he could do so that he could not know tomorrow what he knew today.
Can I not know tomorrow what I know now? What young Abel knew now was that his daddy wasn’t powerful. Big Abel can’t protect me. Can I not know tomorrow what I know now? It seemed an impossible necessity. All his thoughts, all his understanding, all his abilities, starting with a toddler’s ability to hold his own water, were fleeing.
Big Abel waved to his son to go to him. Abel couldn’t let go of the policeman’s hand. He was too afraid. Big Abel shut his eyes.
The stout woman who had barred the door, who had tried to prevent the other women from witnessing what she had witnessed, was now standing on the porch hollering to Big Abel.
“There’s some rednecks on the phone and they wanna know how you like your boy’s birthday present.”
“Tell them to fuck themselves,” said Big Abel.
“Yep,” said the woman.
It seemed to Abel that his father was asking a woman to do what he couldn’t do. The crowd saw it another way; they applauded.
Despite the best efforts of the Fantastic Four, the fire blazed until the white firemen arrived and put it out.
After the fire trucks and the policemen had driven away, Big Abel announced, “Time for cake and ice cream.”
Abel didn’t want any.
“He can save that for a better year,” said his mother.
“We’re singing and you’re eating,” his father responded.
“I don’t want to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ or eat cake,” said Abel, who had not had a chance to stop and change his clothes.
“We’re singing and you’re eating,” Big Abel repeated. He didn’t like repeating himself.
“Why?” asked Abel.
“Terror disrupts rituals,” said Big Abel.
The party reconvened. Abel changed clothes. As soon as the cake was eaten, Big Abel approached Abel. His son’s eyes were as full of fear as his discarded pants were full of piss.
“Go get a strap and wait for me in your room.” Abel’s eyes went hard. A whipping was a familiar thing. He was stronger than a whipping. Maybe everything would be all right. When he walked upstairs toward his bedroom away from the noise of the party, he walked angry, not scared. Copacetic.
Waycross approached Big Abel.
“Sir, about Little Man . . .”
“A Negro boy afraid of white folks is worse than dead.” Waycross dropped his head. A man raises his child as he sees fit.
Sitting on his bed waiting for his father, Abel was thinking, the only thing worse than a Saturday birthday was a Sunday birthday. It was getting so Abel didn’t like church. He didn’t like the preacher, didn’t like the way they, the family, were all so visible, didn’t like the way his father always had them arriving late, didn’t like taking communion after singing that creepy song, There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, didn’t like getting on his knees, didn’t know for sure that Jesus was the son of God, wasn’t sure there was a God to have a son, didn’t want to be someplace where one person, the preacher, was free to stand up and tell what and why and how he was right about everything, while everyone else was free to keep their mouth shut and smile. Considering how bad having a birthday on a Sunday was made Abel just a little grateful.
Mainly he was jealous. He was turning thirteen. He half wished he were having a bar mitzvah. He liked bar mitzvahs. Even from the pews, even as a twelve-year-old waiting to turn thirteen himself, he’d been able to see something change when he’d watched his newly turned thirteen-year-old friends read aloud from the Torah for the very first time before the whole congregation. He could feel, though he could not name, the sense of entitlement bestowed, the sense of arriving, the sense of recognition conveyed to the bar mitzvah boy as his community began to try to understand him to be a man. Abel wanted all of that for himself.
He lusted for recognition like he lusted for the big-bosomed white-skinned centerfold ladies. He wanted it all the more acutely for knowing this too was something his daddy didn’t have, that his granddaddy hadn’t had.
Sitting on his bed, swinging his legs restlessly, waiting to be released, for punishment to be over, for the whipping to be done, he wondered what portion of the Torah had been read by the Swiss-German Jew who was kin to him, his father’s great-grandfather.
Don’t think about that. Think about something else. Think about what was supposed to be.
Abel was supposed to have had a birthday party. A grown-up fill-the-house-with-people birthday party, the kind he hadn’t had since he had begun rea
l school. Since he’d begun school he had had single-sex parties at some public place: a bowling alley, a skating rink, a movie theater, someplace neutral, someplace familiar and comfortable to the white kids in his class. The only problem was that his mother had never been comfortable and his father had never come. If he had known how bad it could get he would have left his parties as they had been.
Except he wanted his mother to be comfortable and he wanted his father to be present, and he wanted something different for turning thirteen. He had learned his lesson about wanting.
Big Abel always kept his law office open on Saturday, always worked on Saturday, usually coming home around four. I should have left it the way it was. Every year on Abel’s birthday and his sister’s birthday, Big Abel would take his wife out to dinner. “She’s the one who did all the work,” Big Abel would say, patting his wife’s arm. “And you’ve already had your party.” I should have left it alone.
It was one of the few things that Abel and his sister agreed on: birthday nights were very lonely and quiet. This year he had wanted it to be different. He hadn’t wanted to eat early with Tess while their mother was out getting her hair fixed or in the back of the house getting dressed for dinner. He hadn’t wanted his parents to leave after hearing his and Tess’s prayers and kissing them each on both cheeks, after telling them they were to be in bed asleep by eight thirty.
Ever since they were old enough to stay at home alone, since they were eight and ten, at eight thirty on birthday nights they would be in their respective bedrooms with the lights out. But neither could quite fall asleep that early. Abel would be in his book-lined bedroom just above his parents’ and Tess would be in her white bedroom beside his. The parents would come home whispering loudly. Then the sounds of moans and cries would start rising from their bedroom.
This year was different. This year they were all together. This year everything had gone wrong. I am wrong. Abel held the belt as he waited, stroking some of the length of it. I am wrong. He repeated the same sentence over and over again when he couldn’t make himself think about something less frightening.
Abel knew himself to be an odd little boy. He was hoping to be a simple man.
Because everyone who knew him knew he was black, and because everyone in North Nashville knew Abel, the boy with kinky golden curls flying past on a bike, everyone in North Nashville except Abel knew that Abel was black. He remembered the day he’d been told. It had been in this very room, in his bedroom. He didn’t want to remember.
When he went downtown it was a different story. He rarely went downtown— except with his grandmother. Antoinette and Big Abel, remembering downtown from its most recently segregated days, preferred to wait and shop for clothes only when they traveled to Chicago or New York. Sometimes Grandma took Abel downtown. Grandma was an adventurous woman with a love of fashion and a taste for changing times. If she could go in the stores and get proper help from a saleswoman, she would go in the stores, driving the little car her husband had bought her on her sixty-fifth birthday and then had taught her to drive a year before he died of a sudden heart at-tack, almost as if he had known death was coming. And Grandma took her little grandson with her. Sometimes people thought she was his mammy. And sometimes he liked it. I should be punished for that.
Whenever Abel was going to get a whipping, he tried to think of a reason he deserved one. Usually it wasn’t the reason he was getting one. His father didn’t whip him often but he whipped him awfully— and almost always for reasons Abel didn’t understand. Waiting was the worst part. He was almost happy when Big Abel finally entered the room.
“Take off those soiled clothes.”
Big Abel looked away as his son disrobed. The boy didn’t say he had already changed. It was beside the point.
“Are you a baby?”
“No, sir.”
“I should save those clothes and make you wear them tomorrow and the next day, shouldn’t I?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir?”
“No, sir.”
For a moment Big Abel looked as if he saw something in this naked man-boy he couldn’t be cruel to, no matter to what purpose. Then he saw something else.
“You afraid of crackers, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t I tell you not to be afraid of anybody or anything but me and God?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you afraid of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going to do you a favor, boy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When you walk out of this room, you’re not going to be afraid of anything but me.”
Big Abel closed the door. When the sun rose the next morning there were two men living under Abel’s roof and they hated each other. Happy Birthday.
Big Abel left for church before any of his family awoke. He left a note saying he was going to early service, then down to his law office. When Antoinette, who had stumbled into her room drunk and exhausted long after her husband had finished doling out discipline in the next room, saw spotting on the sheets as she made the bed, she made a note to schedule an appointment with the gynecologist. Then she stripped the sheets, bleached the mattress with a sponge, and put the linens in the washer with more bleach. After that she got her girl and her boy into the car, then into church for the eleven o’clock service.
In the afternoon the Fantastic Four called down to the house for Abel to go up to their house and get his presents. Gardeners were arriving in a flatbed truck, loaded down with sod to redo the front lawn, as Abel marched up the street. The Fantastic Four fed Abel McDonald’s hamburgers and French fries and told him stories of the whippings they had gotten as boys and the whippings their daddies had gotten. And in case that was insufficient balm in this par tic u lar Gilead, they told him the story of the beatings they had taken to cross the burning sands into their fraternity.
After a time, Abel let their stories make him smile. The stories did make things better. Not good, but better. His big friends had not protected him. Abel hated them for that. He hated the Fantastic Four for not having protected him from his daddy. And he hated his daddy. He hated the people he trusted so much that he had no hate left over to hate the Klan.
My worst day is behind me. He would find his safe place. He would find the strong men. He would make all the weak people and all the vicious people and all the weak and vicious people pay. Abel made that promise to himself as he fell asleep. It was a promise he would keep. He cuddled to the truth like it was a stuffed bear: terror is bigger than love, and shelter sweeter than excitement. Touching himself in the safety of his anger, he soiled the sheets the woman, the mother, would have to wash. He knew a truth and would exploit it. Abel was a man.
Hope drained the last of her glass. Nicholas drained the last of his.
“You and Abel played a better game of ‘Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.’ ”
“Different, not better.”
“Who can tell us how much Abel had to do with Abu Ghraib?”
“Your friend from Birmingham.”
“Aria.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of booking us both on a flight to Washington.”
“That’s not the liberty I’d anticipated.”
“Allow me to accommodate you more cordially.”
“If I cheat on my husband it will be with a ghost.”
“A waste.”
“You don’t know the power of my imagination.”
He took Hope’s hand and kissed it again. She kissed him full on the lips without opening her mouth. Then she was gone.
By the time she was halfway home Hope had almost decided not to accompany Nicholas any farther on his journey. She had no strong wish to be with Nicholas on the plane to Reagan Airport. His Abel was too different from her Abel. But she needed to know what Aria knew, and Aria’s Abel might be more different still. Hope needed Nicholas.
When she arrived at her house she showered and slipped into
her bed. Touching herself, she thought of the girl she had been and the boy Abel had been that summer in Italy. Then she turned off the light and tried to settle into the sleep of the grown.
Instead, she started thinking about the Bible. Abel’s Bible. She was thinking about the numbers he had always used for his computer password back when she had still known his password: 4133132. But it had really been 4,13,31,32. The four was for the fourth book of the Bible, Numbers. The 13 was for the chapter; 31 and 32 were the verses.
She turned the light back on. She sat propped up on the bed in the pillows. She pulled the King James Bible she kept in the nightstand out of the drawer. She turned to Numbers:
These are the names of the men which Moses sent to spy out the land . . . And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said unto them, Get you up this way southward and go up into the mountain: and see the land, what it is, and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many; And what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad, and what cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strongholds, And what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of the fruit of the land. Now the time was the time of the first ripe grapes . . .
But your little ones which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised. But as for you, your carcasses, they shall fall in this wilderness.
Thinking that God himself punished less-than-intrepid spies, and that she owed Abel much, Hope was headed to Washington.
Part III
THE NEWS TRAVELED faster than any other news ever. Dr. King had been shot dead. The date was April 4, 1968. Abel’s house quickly became a gathering place. Friends and even some people they didn’t know arrived at the house on Fifteenth Street without invitation until there were fifty or sixty grown people in the house, crying and getting drunk.
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