Babylon Sisters

by Pearl Cleage

By the time I left Ezola Mandeville’s office, we had hammered out the broad outlines of a relationship that seemed mutually beneficial, and my job search was over before it got started good. She was interested in targeting immigrant and refugee women to offer her services, and she needed my help to reach them effectively. It was a great idea. Many of these women needed immediate temporary work to help support their families, and they were motivated to work hard by the dreams that had brought them to America in the first place. I was happy to make the hookup. If they were going to be doing service work, Ezola’s operation would be more protection than they were going to find anywhere else, decent wages, and even a few benefits. It seemed like a winning combination all the way around.

  Plus, the money she was offering me was enough to cover all of Phoebe’s college costs and let me put a little aside for myself. The only problem was, I had a company. So I made a counteroffer that allowed me to start working for her freelance while I finished my current projects. She reluctantly agreed and I promised I’d be on board full-time in three months. How I was going to get it all done was something I’d have to figure out later. But for now we shook hands to seal the deal and enjoyed our coffee with a slice of sweet-potato pie.

  Outside, I gave my ticket to the young woman at the valet stand who stamped it paid and called for my car to be brought around front. As I stood there waiting, I could hear the radio she had playing quietly beside her. She was listening to black talk radio, something I almost never do, since I can be ignorant all by myself. An indignant woman was urging the show’s listeners to support the first black American Idol winner because she thought he wasn’t getting as much airplay and publicity as the white runner-up had gotten, including being featured solo on the cover of Rolling Stone, a magazine this woman had probably never read in her life.

  “Buy his CD on day one,” she was urging all those within the sound of her voice. “These white folks need to be taught a lesson once and for all.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Sometimes these Atlanta Negroes drive me crazy. All they ever talk about is race! Not race in the sense of the human family. Not race in the sense of the complexities of living in the global village, with its awe-inspiring displays of cultural diversity. Those discussions would be interesting, certainly challenging, and might even result in some concrete changes in lifestyle or public policy.

  But no! In Atlanta, racial discussions continue along the lines established all those years ago when former governor Lester Maddox was at his segregated restaurant handing out pick handles to keep the Pickwick the bastion of white supremacy and bad food it had always been. Black folks on one side, trying to get in. White folks on the other side, trying to keep us out. It’s such a simplistic, counterproductive way of looking at things, especially when all the people in charge around here are black. We’re still bitching like the last twenty years never happened at all. It’s exhausting.

  Sometimes Louis accuses me of being an elitist, but I’m not. I just wish we had a bigger worldview, that’s all. The fact that Brother Ruben, as she kept calling him, garnered a big record contract, earned the love of legions of fans, appeared on countless magazine covers and TV shows, and received a Grammy nomination meant nothing to the woman who was calling. In her mind, he was black, and therefore a victim in need of the protection that only racial solidarity can afford.

  “What do you think about what she said?” I asked the young woman in the booth.

  She glanced up at me quickly to see if she could be candid and then shrugged her shoulders. “If you askin’ me, it seems like she’s makin’ it into a sympathy thing. You know, buy the brother’s CD to help him out. But he don’t need that. He can really sing. You know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  The host apparently did, too. “Y’all ain’t gotta do Brother Ruben no favors, though,” he said. “Check him out.”

  The voice belonging to the brother in question was one of those full, rich, chocolate voices that only come out of the mouths of black men. Jerry Butler has one. Isaac Hayes has one. The Temptations had five between them, and Barry White had at least two all by himself. Ruben Studdard wasn’t in their league yet, but he was working on it, and the boy definitely had promise.

  Sort of like Atlanta, I thought as my car pulled up to the curb and the young valet hopped out, accepted my tip, and closed the door behind me. Big and corny and full of passionate potential that it never quite fulfills. But just when you think you know everything there is to know about the place, it turns the note you expected to hear in a direction you had never considered and you find yourself heading home with all the windows rolled down, singing your ass off, and being eternally grateful for even the possibility of perfection.

  10

  The problem when your two best friends become a couple is that they’re never around when you’re up for a spontaneous celebration. They’re always at lunch or on their way to the movies or strolling in the park or simply not answering their phones because they’ve got better things to do. Although I was dying to share my good news, Amelia and Louis were nowhere to be found. When I got home and called her office Amelia’s secretary said she’d left early, and the answering machine was on at the newspaper even though it wasn’t even four o’clock.

  This was serious. Louis always wrote his weekly columns on Monday, since the paper was in production on Tuesday to hit the stands on Wednesday. But today he had not only left early, but closed the office. Amelia and Louis had been friends since I introduced them, but four months ago she took him to a Sweet Honey in the Rock concert at Spelman, and ever since then they’d been thick as thieves. They were still being cool around me, but I could feel a new energy between them.

  I used to try to tease Louis that he had printer’s ink for blood, but he took it as a compliment. The Sentinel was his life. He was the owner, editor, and publisher. It was the only job he ever had, starting as a delivery boy when he was just a kid. His father, Louis Adams Sr., had founded the Sentinel in 1964 and raised his son to believe their mission, “to tell the truth to the people,” was worth the sacrifices they had to make as a family to get it into the hands of its readers. In the early days, the paper was often under attack by the Ku Klux Klan for encouraging black voter registration. The office was firebombed twice, and Louis told me he had answered the phone at their house many times as a child to hear a snarling male voice threaten his father’s life or his mother’s safety.

  But those were the glory days. The staff had dwindled to Louis, his longtime receptionist, Miss Iona Williams, a couple of interns from the A.U. Center, and two freelance reporters who covered everything from church news to city hall, and none of it very well. The only reason to pick up the paper at all was to read Louis’s blistering editorials. He was as passionate about politics as his father had been, and as well informed. He had contacts all over the place who fed him information so his columns, which he ran in large type on the front page in a move right out of Citizen Kane, were full of unexpected tidbits that made them required reading for anybody who wanted to traverse the labyrinth that is our local political scene. The Sentinel was a losing proposition economically, but for Louis it was both a legacy and a labor of love. Imagining Louis without the Sentinel was like imagining Louis without his lopsided grin. Impossible.

  So a group celebration was out, but I was still full of nervous energy from my meeting with Ezola, and I didn’t feel like getting right back to work. Outside, the sky was an unbroken expanse of blue, and the breeze was blowing cool air from the north Georgia mountains. I opened the back door and stepped outside. As if to banish any lingering doubts that this was a perfect day, an impossibly red-breasted robin was singing itself silly in the middle of my sunflowers.

  That’s when I decided to take Amelia up on her standing invitation of a swim. I’d have the pool to myself. Just me and that mermaid and all that sunshine. Maybe it was time for a little reward after surviving my recent trials by fire. We’re alwa
ys quick to fuss at ourselves when we do it wrong. I want to reward myself when I do it right. My daughter isn’t mad at me anymore, and my best friends are falling in love before my very eyes. Maybe it was standing my ground with Phoebe. Or maybe it was being in the room with Ezola’s strange energy and Bessie’s ghost, or maybe even something in Sam Hall’s shiny bald head, but I felt like I could go Amelia’s fifty laps, and fifty more, without even breathing hard.

  Which is, of course, the real test. Not just can you do it, but can you make it look so easy everybody thinks they can do it, too, until they try it and come up winded, gasping for air, and hoping nobody’s watching. That’s not me. I’ve worked hard to get here and I’m ready for my close-up. Been ready. Why do you think I bought a new bathing suit, just in case?

  11

  The next week flew by in a blur of closing out old files, creating new ones, and reading through the mountain of material Sam had sent over to familiarize me with their Mandeville Maids. He was in Miami on business all week, which was fine with me. By the time he got back, I’d have some ideas ready for him to review.

  Louis and Amelia had congratulated me on my new client, and on surviving Phoebe’s last visit. I had teased them about their whereabouts when I tried to share my good news. They looked properly sheepish, and their answers were evasive enough to confirm my suspicions. I wondered if Phoebe had noticed it, too? I’d have to remember to ask her next time we talked.

  The house had returned to its pre-Phoebe state of calm, and I was getting loads of work done, but the truth was, at the end of the day I really missed her. Our closeness was partly a result of my raising her alone, but more because we enjoyed each other’s company like good friends do. When she first went to Fairfield two years ago, I was a wreck. She wanted to go. It was her idea, so I wasn’t worried about her making the adjustment. What threw me was how quiet the house was. I was so used to her music, her voice, her friends, her radio, her computer, her television shows, her favorite DVDs, her guitar, that when she left, the silence was almost overwhelming.

  For some reason, I started listening to a lot of opera, Puccini especially, since he’s the one my mother liked and these were her records I was playing, especially Madame Butterfly and La Boh'eme. All those doomed sopranos and impossibly passionate tenors helped me fill up the house with other voices that didn’t remind me that my baby was now off on her own in the world, growing up and having adventures while I was just rattling around in a big, empty house. For the first time in a long time, I was lonely. Sure, I had my friends and my work, but there I was, still relatively young, still reasonably attractive, all dressed up with no place to go. I had had only two lovers, if you can even call them that, since Phoebe’s father left for Africa. They were nice enough guys, and I wasn’t looking for mad love as much as a friend I could sometimes sleep with. I thought it would be easy, but once you get out of school, it’s much harder to meet single men.

  The ones I did meet never seemed to have it all together in one place. The ones I liked to talk to were already married or didn’t appeal to me sexually. The ones who appealed to me sexually usually had no interest in the things I cared about. Only twice did I think I had found somebody interesting, but neither one worked out. In both cases, the sex was terrible. One guy was so inept that teaching him would have required more effort than I was prepared to put in, and the other one had seen one too many porno movies and firmly believed that the best position in which to have sex was doggie style, no matter how many times I assured him this was a male fantasy, not a female preference.

  After those disasters, I tried a couple of vibrators, but they made me feel pathetic, Sex and the City notwithstanding, and I didn’t want to explain what they were to Phoebe, since I knew she would find them sooner or later. She’s gone through my drawers and closets since she was a kid, just like I used to search through my mother’s things looking for clues to who she really was. Trying to crack that mysterious code. So I got rid of the machinery and made sure to masturbate au naturel at least a couple of times a month to keep everything in working order, but that was pretty much it.

  That was still pretty much it. I don’t think about sex much when Phoebe’s home. I think my maternal instinct keeps my libido at bay, but lately when she leaves, I can’t help it. Amelia says thirty-five to forty-five is a period of intense sexual energy for women because we are facing the end of our childbearing years, and the urge to express all we are and know sexually is overwhelming—her word, not mine.

  Well, I’m thirty-eight, and it wasn’t that bad yet, but the devil does find work for idle hands, so I put on my mom’s scratchy old album of Leontyne Price singing Madame Butterfly and went to get the mail. I was delighted to find a letter from Phoebe sitting on top of the stack. E-mail had encroached on our letter writing, but we still managed to sneak in a real letter, on real stationery, with real stamps, every now and then, and it was always a treat.

  I dropped the rest of the mail on the coffee table and carried Phoebe’s letter over to the couch so I could curl up and savor it. I tucked up my bare feet, unfolded the pages that smelled vaguely of my daughter’s scent, and read these words.

  Dear Mom,

  I know you won’t like what I have to say, but you know I would never do something like this if it weren’t really important to me. I have a right to know my father.

  She underlined my father in red like I might miss it.

  You have made a decision not to tell me what I want to know, and I respect that, but now I’m asking you to respect the decision I have made.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. What was this girl talking about?

  I have taken your college diaries back to school with me. I’ve only taken the ones that would fit the time period when I might have been conceived. I’ve made a list of the possible candidates—your lovers—

  She underlined that, too, just to make sure I was paying attention.

  And I’ve sent them all a letter outlining my situation and requesting that they have a DNA test and forward the results to me, with a copy to you.

  She’s got to be kidding! She has to be!

  I know you’re probably mad at me now, but I had to do what was best for me and not let you talk me out of it. Please don’t try to contact me. I’ve moved off campus with two girlfriends and I’ve changed my cell number. I just don’t think I can talk to you again until you can tell me the truth about my father. It’s just too painful. Please don’t hate me, Mom. This is my life we’re talking about. Not yours. If you need to reach me in an emergency, Louis will be able to find me, but only in an emergency.

  A final red streak under that for emphasis and then the usual sign-off.

  Love you, Mom.

  Phoebe

  12

  There are only two kinds of offices that house black newspapers. One is at the top of a long, rickety set of wooden stairs that would drive the fire marshal crazy if he ever inspected anything in these neighborhoods, which he doesn’t. The second is the ground-floor storefront in some bustling black commercial strip with the name of the paper printed in big white letters across the plate-glass window in the front. The Sentinel took the second option and occupied a row of four connected storefronts on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

  At the Sentinel, just like at every other black newspaper office I’ve ever visited, the first person you encounter when you come through the front door is a middle-aged-to-ancient black woman who answers the phone, routes calls, greets visitors, and keeps up with who’s in and who’s out and when they’ll be back. In the midst of these duties, she also clips newspapers—her own home publication and as many others as the editor deems appropriate. Her desk is always piled high with well-stuffed folders that need to be filed under headings like, Black Mayors, 1974–1976, or Police Brutality or Denzel Washington. They are also the ones who rewrite the church news column so it’s ready for the world, open the mail, and remind the editor to go home and get some sleep every once in a while.
/>   It was a full-time job back in the days when the Sentinel had six full-time reporters, four in town and two traveling the South to bring back coverage that placed Atlanta in the wider context of region. The Sentinel was the only black newspaper in town to send a reporter to the Pettus Bridge. They even had a reporter jailed in Albany and held without bail until Louis Sr. drove down with a lawyer from the Gate City Bar Association and brought him home. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for the crusading editor to sleep on the big, well-worn leather sofa in his office. After his mother died, Louis Jr. was accustomed to waking up alone at home and calling his father at the Sentinel to say he was making breakfast and did Louis Sr. want him to cook enough eggs for two, as if this were the normal exchange between father and son.

  But the Sentinel’s glory days were behind it now, and the full-time staff had dwindled to Louis and Miss Iona Williams, who was still holding down the position of honor just inside the front door. Miss Iona, as everyone called her, had been the voice on the Sentinel’s answering machine for as long as anyone could remember, urging callers to leave a message and “don’t forget to do something for freedom today.” She had also been Louis Sr.’s longtime companion after he was widowed young, but had never married him out of loyalty to his wife, who was one of her best friends from girlhood.

  At sixty-plus, Miss Iona was still a beauty. Her skin was smooth under the flawless makeup she was never seen without, and her salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a short pixie that had been her trademark style as long as I’d known her. One of those rare people who truly understands the difference between style and fashion, Miss Iona was wearing a dark green dress from the fifties that looked as modern as today. She was my role model. Sixty-five and sexy was a goal worth striving for, but today I doubted I’d make forty before my insane child gave me a heart attack.