Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  The father takes you in his arms and tries to get you not to shake but it feels like he is strangling you and you shake harder.

  The father wants to laugh at this colossal and unanticipated, by him, consequence of integration’s progress. You are ashamed of him. He kisses you again and pats the top of your curly-kinky crown. You are ashamed of him. The breach is a reciprocal bond.

  Ultimately it is not strange and dramatic occurrences that shatter; it is a shivering hug that can not matter enough.

  Later you lie and say it was altogether different. Later you fear your own son and the fun-house mirrors his eyes have become. You un-tell the lie but just to yourself. Later, you translate an utter and tender, complete and mutual defeat into the oldest and most powerful male story you know—domination and transference. When you tell the rape tale, you elevate, you believe, father and son. At long last, love.

  A lei. A hula girl. A baby born across the world. The last bedtime story. Once upon a time, with nobody watching, in the early days of August 1961, a skinny brown baby, six pounds and a few ounces, was born, unwitnessed, born with black eyes in the maternity hospital founded by Queen Kapi’olani, a woman who would birth no children from her own body, a granddaughter of Kaumuali’i, the last king of Kaua’i. Unwitnessed is free-ey. Though the delivery was contorted (in ways that were to become customary celebrations of science), just after the birth the mother, a slip of eighteen barely become a woman, high on the hot colors of the Hawaiian sky, held the son to her breast and let him suck, dreaming she was rain and he was earth.

  Early days. She sang “Ahe Lau Makani” and “Beautiful Are the Flowers of Ko’olau” thinking this baby is a flower of the world. She sang, “You are a flower of Paradise.” There was no “John Henry” sung around this bed or “Hoochie Coochie Man.” This boy’s world was so different from that boy’s world. That boy’s mama so different from this mama. And all the choices after, so different from my own. Good night, sweet prince.

  The earth does not require our wretchedness. Abel got the news via television. He watched the man the Hawaiian baby had grown to become give a speech in Boston. Heard him talk about the marine Seamus. Near to where pilgrims once sought to build a city on a hill, a new Jerusalem, Abel caught a glimpse of a new happily ever after. My feets is weary but my soul’s at rest.

  ***

  Abel noted the final acceleration. He was near to the place— Waynesboro, North Carolina—where the last shot of the Civil War was fired. He had indulged his memory for eight of the nine minutes he had allotted himself. When he ceased to wish for night, not death, to enclose him; when all he could see was the woman in the green and black corduroy dress tying a blue tie around his son’s neck, Abel ordered his conscripted tears to roll down his cheeks, then marshaled his almost-last-breath to beg.

  A pillow, soft and clean, swooped down to assist the inhaled horse dander. Abel smiled again. Absolutely. He could already see the carousel.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have known my editor, Anton Mueller, since I was a twenty-two-year-oldgirl writing love poems, country songs, and magazine articles about the Talented Tenth and he was a fresh-out-of-Hampshire-College kid writing a review of an early Ondaatje book for the Washington Post. Good ride, cowboy. I want to thank my agent, Amy Williams of McCormick and Williams, for getting my work from first read. Jay McInerney is a sweet-hearted man. He has been generous with encouragement and introductions and bold in championing my work from the get-go. He helped me get to this third novel.

  My writing process includes talking out the narrative with D. Kirk Barton. I thank him for his most profound understanding of story. Siobhan Kennedy, retired pop star and mama, helps me manage the practical realities of my Nashville life.

  I want to thank the readers of my working drafts, Houston Baker, Lizzie Brook, Daniela Croda, Kimiko Fox, Lovalerie King, Carter Little, Jenny Miyasaki, Mimi Oka, Stephanie Pruitt, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Hortense Spillers, Breck Walker, and Jane Waterlow, for their thoughtful responses to the evolving manuscript.

  Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Vanessa D. Dickerson in Dark Victorians; Leigh Anne Duck of the University of Memphis; Lori B. Harrison-Kahan with Freshman Seminar 40e, “Rewriting America: Race, Feminism, and Classic Narratives,” at Harvard University; Michael Kreyling of Vanderbilt University; Lovalerie King of Pennsylvania State University; Andrea Elizabeth Shaw in The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly political Bodies; Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University; Nell Painter; and Patricia Yeager in “Circum-Atlantic Superabundance: Milk as World-Making in Alice Randall and Kara Walker”—all have honored my work by engaging it in a particularly interesting book, article, chapter, course, or roundtable and I thank them for it.

  As writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University I am heiress to a rich literary tradition. I want to thank Tony Earley for introducing me to the Vanderbilt English Department and for being a friend. I also want to thank Richard McCarty for originally bringing me on board; and our inspired chancellor, Nicholas Zeppos, for encouraging me to stay. Developing courses with Cecelia Tichi is one of the great pleasures of being at Vanderbilt. Developing courses for Jay Clayton, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, and Charlotte Pierce-Baker (in the English, African-American and Diaspora Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies departments) is another great pleasure. Janis May is the Queen of Institutional Memory and Administrative Insight in Benson Hall. Lucius Outlaw and David Williams were my first champions at the university and remain my dynamic allies.

  I would like to thank my godchildren, Kazuma, Charlie, Moses, Takuma, Lucas, Cynara, and Aria, for being their amazing (shockingly athletic, quite beautiful, often particular, always kind, fiercely poetic) selves. They inspire me.

  Mimi, Jun, Kimiko, David F., Kirk, John S., and Reggie, you are the siblings of my soul. Godmommy Lea, Flo, Edith, and Joan, thank you for finding a way to treat me like you were treated—as a treasured daughter. David Ewing, you are my husband dear to me like no other.

  Black American culture recognizes the exalted tie of “play cousin.” I claim many joyfully: Amanda, Ann, Caroline, Debra Gail, Hope, Kate, Martha, Matraca, Perian, and Tracy, as well as Alex, Bob, Brad, Brad, Carter, Howard, Jonathan, Marc, Marq, Matthew, Neil, Ray, Rex, Steve, Steve, and Zick.

  One of the pleasures of life in the South is a calendar of parties and celebrations that rarely changes. My year begins with fireworks on the Ezell porch, moving on to black-eyed peas later in the day. The third Monday of every month is Link meeting. Easter means the Foxes will be here; we will be talking about the time Caroline found the golden egg with Steven’s help and watching the itty-bitties toddle across the lawn in linen and bows while the steeplechase is about to be run. The Fourth of July finds us on Whitland Avenue with the Stringers and half the world we love. Then school starts and we give out candy on Nichol Lane. Thanksgiving means the Makihara-Oka clan will arrive for my favorite holiday of the year and it’s time to start baking herb crisps and sweet potato pie, after bolting down the Boulevard and eating the Hammocks’ breakfast casserole. Then it’s on to the breakfast we give the Saturday before Christmas, and Sue Atkinson’s for December 23, then the Cheeks’ for Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day it’s breakfast with the Richard Ewings at Flo’s, where Maddie dazzles and Richard shines. Then we’re on our way to God-mommy Lea’s for dinner when we’re lucky enough to get her. And on the finest days, and there are many, there are impromptu tea parties with smoked salmon, and Irish Breakfast tea, and vanilla pudding, and flan. I thank everyone who cooks for me and who allows me to cook for them and has eaten my poached pears for keeping life sweet.

  Through the years I have cooked for no one more often or lovingly than Caroline Randall Williams, my daughter. I hope she will always be able to find me in the strawberry cakes, and blueberry crepes, and corn bread madeleines; in milky Earl Gre
y tea, and smoky Lapsang souchong; in little salmon sandwiches; and in peanut butter on a silver spoon. And when she can’t find me there I know she can find me in a Steve Earle song or a Guy Clark fable we sang along to when she was a baby and after she became a woman. I hope one day she hands down her Riverside Shakespeare to a son or a daughter. If that child makes half as much of it as Caroline made of mine, she will be a very lucky woman. Being Caroline’s mother is my greatest joy and the most significant responsibility of my life. Watching her become a young poet and a young woman has renewed my sense of wonder.

  Over and over when I was a girl my father, George S. Randall, charged me with “speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves.” I thank him for obliging me to write and for loving me into voice.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone and Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. Born in Detroit, she grew up in Washington, D.C. As a Harvard undergraduate majoring in English, she studied with Julia Child, Harry Levin, Alan Heimert, and Nathan Huggins. After graduation Randall headed south to Music City where she founded with friends the music publishing company Midsummer Music with the idea that it would fund novel writing and a community of powerful storytellers. On her way to writing The Wind Done Gone, she became the first black woman in history to write a number one country song. She also wrote a video of the year, worked on multiple Johnny Cash videos, and wrote and produced a pilot for a primetime drama about ex-wives of country stars that aired on CBS. She has written with or published some of the greatest songwriters of the era, including Steve Earle, Matraca Berg, Bobby Braddock, and Mark Sanders. Two novels later the award-winning songwriter with over twenty recorded songs to her credit and frequent contributor to Elle magazine is Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. She teaches courses on country lyric in American culture, creative writing, and soul food as text and in text. Randall lives near the university with her husband, a ninth generation Nashvillian, who practices green law. Her daughter is a student at Harvard. After twenty-one years hard at it, Randall has come to the conclusion that motherhood is the most creative calling of all.