Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  It was a fifth and final blow. Medgar Evers, June 12, 1963, shot walking into his ranch house, leaving two boys and a girl. The four little girls bombed in church on September 15, 1963. November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy killed in Dallas. February 21, 1965, Malcolm X. Now the daddy of Yolanda, Little Martin, Bernice, and Dexter was dead.

  In Big Abel’s house it was the end of an era that in Nashville had begun with the bombing at the home of Z. Alexander Looby in April 1960. Abel didn’t remember a time when politically active black men weren’t dying.

  He was over black men. King’s death did it. He heard all the sadness. He heard other things too. That King was up in that hotel with a white woman. In his little boy’s mind and in his grown man’s mind, Abel always blamed Coretta for the death. It would take Hope to almost undo that. No one could undo his sadness that he hadn’t saved the wrapper off the candy bar Dr. King had given him.

  That very night eight-year-old Abel started saying no when people asked if he wanted to run for his father’s seat on the city council when he grew up.

  He was over black people. Ever since he could remember he had heard the phrase that all he had to do was be black and die. And now the only two things he for sure didn’t want to do were be black and die.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ON THE SAME flight to Washington that Abel had taken every third week, commuting to his office at the Pentagon from his house in Ardmore, Hope was thinking about Aria Reese. She was wondering if Abel had thought about Aria on the flight too. Nicholas’s eyes were closed. His thumb and ring finger were bent to touch, forming a circle. His breath was slow and deep. Nicholas believed pi lots and planes benefited from his serene concentration.

  Aria was the only woman Hope had ever kissed as she had kissed Abel and Waycross and, a long time past, Nicholas.

  Hope’s and Aria’s enchantment had lasted only a long weekend. They’d been, each for the other, an atypical diversion. The friendship was long-standing.

  The women had first met when Hope was at Harvard and Ari, the future national security advisor, was at Wellesley. They had both been invited to an AKA sorority event. Discovering a bouquet of shared preferences and experiences ranging from the uncommon (each had created a diorama of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon) to the common (claiming Zora Neale Hurston as their favorite writer), the women had quickly become friends. That Easter, Hope had gone home with Ari to Birmingham.

  They saw the Wedgwood at the museum. They saw the church that had been bombed. Aria said one of the girls, Denise McNair, had been a friend of hers and Angela Davis’s. She said Angela had called home from the Sorbonne when she’d heard the news. Just after that Aria showed Hope the statue of Vulcan standing on the hill. And then they kissed. In Hope’s mind that day the beacon in Vulcan’s hand was red. Looking back she doubted it had been shining at all.

  After the divorce, Hope and Ari had rarely crossed paths but the friendship between Ari and Abel had intensified. Then in 2002 Hope and Ari had found themselves staying at the same hotel in Los Angeles. They’d both been attending the NAACP Image Awards. They had sat up in the bar drinking vodka shots as Aria had recounted her dreams and Hope had interpreted them.

  It was a game they had played. West Virginia hoo-doo.

  There had been three dreams. All these years later Hope couldn’t remember anything about the first and she could only remember her interpretation of the second: “No fun being an undercover brother.” The third she remembered with awe and amusement. It had disclosed that Aria was having an affair with the president and that she called the president’s most private part Mr. Wonderful. To Hope this had seemed a small victory for dark women everywhere. Usually, Ari had very patriotic and very erotic dreams. Every once in a while Aria had the same nightmare. Aria had kept rubbing her flat stomach as she’d told this last dream. Then it had been over and she had taken another sip of what she called “moloko” that was just plain vodka without the milk.

  “That means you know that the white woman whose husband you’ve been sleeping with is going to kill you dead if she gets a chance to come away looking clean,” Hope had said.

  “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt me.”

  “Ajay could use an aunt.”

  “I recuse myself.”

  “Because?” Hope had asked.

  “I know Abel almost as well as I know the president.”

  “Invitation withdrawn.”

  In the sober morning, Hope and Aria had smiled in each other’s direction and kept moving as they had crossed the hotel lobby.

  Hope gave the taxi driver a twenty and asked him to wait when they pulled up to the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery. She said there would be another twenty if he was there when they got back. It was the unlikely thing to do and there is safety in doing the unlikely thing. Doing the safe and unlikely thing was a way of paying homage to Abel. Arlington somehow commanded a new respect for Abel. If you don’t act predictably, people can’t plan for you. And if people can’t plan for you, it’s harder to get waylaid.

  That was another thing they had taught her in the seminar on coping with violence abroad: Don’t stick to routine. Don’t go home the same way each day. Don’t make it easy for anyone to target you. Hope remembered Abel saying he wished somebody had taught that lesson to Martin Luther King.

  At the time she had thought it an offensively bitter, sarcastic remark. Now she understood Abel to have been staggeringly sincere.

  Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy had used the same room at the Lorraine Hotel so often that folk in Memphis called it the King-Abernathy suite. Don’t stick to routine. Don’t go home the same way each day. Don’t make it easy for anyone to target you. The knowledge kept rare—that was the knowledge Abel wanted for himself and his.

  By being black and playing by the insider’s rules of self-protection, Hope did Abel what Ajay would have called “a significant solid.”

  Inside Arlington, Hope and Nicholas scanned the crowd, wondering who was busy with the same kind of business Abel had once been busy with.

  She started on the path that led directly toward the Confederate Memorial. Nicholas pulled her back and put them on the path that led toward J. F. K.’s grave.

  Arlington was crowded, now as before, with citizens and foreigners. Standing again at Kennedy’s graveside, Hope was surprised to see a long and literal crack in the monument. She wondered when it would be fixed; then she stopped wondering. The crack was irrelevant.

  Standing in front of the eternal flame that she had always found magical, or mythic, and perhaps even fairy-tale-ish, that she had always found to be evidence that not so long ago the nation had been young and innocent, Hope began to mourn for Abel, who had known from childhood’s hour, from before the first time he stood at this grave, that the nation was not innocent.

  Wrapped warm in the Burberry trench coat Abel had loved to see her in, with Nicholas beside her, in front of Kennedy’s words etched in stone—Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country—Hope cried for Abel for real.

  A group of Albanian nuns scuttled away, frightened by the arrival of a group of silent tight-lipped skinny German girls with black-painted nails, belly rings, nose rings, and tattoos.

  One of the pierced German girls began to read aloud, “Now the trumpet summons us again. Not as a call to bear arms though embattled we are But a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle. A struggle against the common enemies of man: Tyranny. Poverty. Disease. And War itself.” The inscription didn’t end there but the girl stopped reading. The young women stood in silence. Finally one girl had it all figured out. “It is ridiculous,” she announced.

  The German girls moved on, laughing and chattering in a German peppered with French, leaving Hope and Nicholas alone at the grave.

  Hope picked up reading aloud near where the pierced young one had dropped off. “Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill that we shall pay any price bear any burden meet any ha
rdship support any friend oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty . . . In the hour of maximum danger I do not shrink from this responsibility I welcome it . . . The energy the faith the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

  On the rise above Kennedy’s grave was the Custis-Lee mansion. Hope and Abel had both intimately understood that the national cemetery had been placed to defile a family home, the Custis-Lee home, with bodies— with the bodies of victims and conquerors, slaves and soldiers. She wanted to explain this to Nicholas, but he was going on and on about blind people and elephants.

  Sitting on a bench in a cemetery of warriors, he was concluding there were three kinds of villages in the world and every one of them was populated by blind people and elephants.

  In one village everyone had hold of a different part of the same elephant. The people there were always arguing as each kept trying to convince the others they knew what an elephant was.

  In a second village everybody had an elephant of their own and someone arranged things such that when a whistle blew once everyone caught hold of the tip of the trunk; when it blew twice everybody grabbed hold of a rough, fat toe; and when the whistle blew three times everybody grabbed hold of the tail. Each hour of the day everybody was changing their mind about what an elephant was but they were always all in full agreement.

  And there was a third village where there was only one elephant but everybody took the time to touch him all over. In this place the villagers shared an understanding that an elephant was many different things and all at once but you could only deal with the part you were touching.

  “Most people live in the first village. People like Aria and Abel live in the second village,” said Nicholas.

  “And they are the whistle blowers,” said Hope.

  “And you want to set your tent up in the third,” said Nicholas.

  “But that one doesn’t exist,” said Hope.

  “Abel told me he met someone he thought might help that village come to be,” said Nicholas.

  “I can’t imagine anyone getting to that third tent,” said Hope.

  “Abel thought it was going to happen,” said Nicholas.

  She wanted to return to the small southern town that had been Nashville before seven thousand Kurds had settled near the banks of the Cumberland. Before Samir who had found Sad-dam hiding in a spider hole had driven in a green BMW to Nashville to register to vote in the Iraqi elections. Before new thefts had begun at Oak Ridge. Before the Cumberland had become a river in the Middle East. Before the world got smaller and smaller and the contradictions got increasingly savage.

  She wanted to return to a Nashville that no longer existed. And when she got there she wanted to enjoy a kind of safety that no longer existed. It was a sorrow to know that it had leavened something in Abel’s spirits to move from “I am not safe” and “We are not safe” to “No one is safe.”

  “Do you think she will turn up?” asked Nicholas.

  “She might show up faster if you disappear,” said Hope.

  Nicholas flipped the collar of his coat up toward his ears, then put his arm around Hope’s waist for warmth, pulling her closer. She pushed him off and away.

  Perhaps at the end Abel hadn’t wanted to be buried in Arlington because he hadn’t wanted to participate in any more desecration. She wondered if he had arrived at that point. If it had come to that she hoped it was not because he had defiled so much that he could defile no more. Or perhaps it had been a simple act of humility, that at the last Abel hadn’t believed himself worthy.

  Or, maybe it was the man he had met— he had said it was on a plane—his first unhyphenated black man. Abel had declared himself, to Nicholas, ready to die after the chance meeting. He hadn’t remembered, or at least wouldn’t tell Nicholas, the man’s name except he had said it had been a stranger and blacker name than his own and he had talked to the gentleman for an hour and a half and found not a single syllable or hint of race-based double-consciousness.

  Maybe it was that. And maybe Abel had simply figured out that when you’re ready to die, it doesn’t matter where you are buried.

  She found her way back to the place where all the losing had begun, the Confederate Memorial. There was the black soldier and there was the mammy. There was the white man who had carved the memorial and the black daughter he had educated. And there was the black man that daughter had loved who had pioneered open-heart surgery that would allow so many soldiers to survive battles. And there were the babies Alice hadn’t been able to bear, and the white Frenchwoman who had consoled Alice’s husband. It was all an unbroken circle like the statue itself, interlocking betrayals, rescues, and mysteries.

  “Hello, Hope.” The words came from behind. Hope turned to see an elegant woman in a brown wool pantsuit and a camelhair topcoat: Aria Reese.

  Her old friend was wearing exquisite faux riding boots that added two inches to her height, making her six feet tall. Nicholas was nowhere in sight. For a moment Hope felt wide and small.

  “Hey, Ari.”

  “Let’s take a walk, girl.”

  They linked arms. For a moment all either woman felt was safe.

  Arm and arm and slowly, Aria led Hope to the plain white tombstone in section thirty-six with the number 1431 carved into the back. On either side and in front and in back of the stone, other stones ribboned the grassy flat. On the front of 1431 the word MISSISSIPPI, all in capitals, was most prominent, then the given name: Medgar Willey Evers.

  “We came to the fortieth anniversary,” Aria said quietly.

  “We who?”

  “Me and Abel.”

  “I forget how much Evers meant to Abel.”

  “Didn’t forget, didn’t know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I can’t. You’ve got to be from deep down south to know. You can’t read and learn what it is to be a child in war. You just learn what it is to be lucky reading about the unlucky.”

  “I remember Abel kept a framed picture of Myrlie and her son in the pews at the funeral, on his desk.”

  “The Life cover.”

  “The boy’s crying and Myrlie’s wearing a double strand of pearls and white gloves . . .”

  “And a hat, don’t forget the hat . . .”

  “And a tailored black cap-sleeve dress.”

  “Medgar got shot down in front of the pretty house where he lived with his pretty wife and his pretty children and the governor of Mississippi walked arm in arm with his accused murderer during the trial. Abel wanted to get inside the government because he knew it was dirty as much as because he knew it was strong.”

  “And.”

  “And after Ajay was born if he had to choose between his ideals and his safety, he chose his safety. Not Abel’s safety, Ajay’s safety.”

  “When I had the baby I doomed him?”

  “You radicalized him.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s truth. And the rest of the truth is, whatever it is Abel did or didn’t do, knew or didn’t know, you are the one person who has reason to love him despite it all, no matter what all is.”

  “Because?”

  “Ajay.”

  “Ajay?”

  “Ajay.”

  “Is that all you have to say to me?”

  “It’s all I can say.”

  “Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”

  “As I had been sleeping with the widow’s husband, I thought it would be in very bad taste.”

  “Nicholas thinks there’s some possibility he’s not dead.”

  “He’s dead. If he wasn’t I would know. And I would tell you. However many rules or laws it broke. Even if I never told Stokely Carmichael the CIA was really following him and he wasn’t going crazy. And you can fucking tell Nicholas. Abel’s dead. Go home.”

  “First, I’ve got to finish burying the man,” said Hope.

  Wh
en Hope got back to the cab Nicholas was sitting in the backseat blowing smoke out the window. She told the cab driver to head to Dulles Airport.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  NICHOLAS AND HOPE were in a bar at Dulles Airport. He was waiting to board a flight to Tokyo. She was waiting for the flight to Rome. Waycross and Ajay were still in Michigan. She had tried to call and tell them she was about to board a plane, but they weren’t answering their phones. It was her first fortunate moment in many days.

  Nicholas had a last photo to show her. A photo from his seventieth birthday party: Abel and Nicholas walking on a beach. Abel looked serene. Nicholas was talking animatedly, a moving hand blurred in the frame. Hope asked if she could keep it. Nicholas politely refused.

  “I will be on a plane to Detroit later tonight and in Tokyo seventeen hours later. Four hours after that I will be back in Manila and two hours after that I will be back home in my barong Tagalog walking by the South China Sea waiting for three girls who love each other to start massaging the plane crunch out of these old muscles. And three hours after that a very pretty man will allow me to explore the inside of his toothless velvet mouth.”

  “Toothless?”

  “Toothless.”

  “Did you have his teeth taken out?”

  “Of course not. He was a beautiful boy. I never afflict beautiful people. Manila is not what it once was.”

  “The Wild West . . . a place to ware house agents.”

  “Far superior to being a place to torture people legally.”

  “I don’t know anything more about that than what I read in the Times.”

  “I saw Abel.”

  “You saw Abel?”