by Pearl Cleage
The only problem was, in those days we were moving around so much that he never had a chance to explore those charms and assets with anybody but me. Add to that the fact that we were regularly having those marathon late-night conversations that are as intimate as sex with none of the risks of being sorry in the morning. Of course I called it love.
I had been looking for someone like Son all my life. A collaborator. A comrade. Somebody who wanted to change the world as much as I did. I thought he was my soul mate, and I eagerly shared his dream of a life outside of Beth's orbit. Not that it wasn't exciting being with her. It was just that Beth, like a lot of charismatic people, is better appreciated at a distance.
But it wasn't just the charisma that drew me to Beth. She had a program. She was trying to change the world, one single mother at a time, and I wanted to help her do it. How could I resist? I was a child ofthe great movements who had never had one to call my own. My parents, college activists turned radical intellectuals, had raised me on stories of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and their days as student demonstrators at Howard University. Those stories were one of the reasons I went to Howard, but by 1985, the only movement my classmates were interested in was hip-hop, which wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Music is music, but in a revolution, land and resources are supposed to change hands.
So I buried myself in the books, graduated in three years, and completed a master's in literature before I turned twenty-three. I accepted a teaching job at the University of the District of Columbia, thinking I could share my passion for Poetic Language as a Tool for Liberation—my master's topic—with black students eager to exchange ideas and insights with a bright new faculty member barely older than they were.
Two mind-deadening years later, I had yet to find any students who were as concerned about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez as they were about their upcoming tuitions, or their late periods, or whoever's new single was blasting on their car radios. In the course of one long weekend of self-examination when I attempted to answer the question of why was my life so totally messed up, I realized that I hated my job, had no romantic prospects and few friends, and the movement I was waiting for was still nowhere to be found. Sunday night, I let a friend talk me into going to one of Beth's speeches mainly because I was tired of bitching about my boring life. How could I have known everything was about to change?
And now it's about to change again. Beth didn't sound any different on the phone, a little nervous, but that's to be expected. She not only accused me of trying to ruin her business by stealing her son—she actually used the word stealing like he was a sweater from Saks—she called around to everybody I might have been able to ask for a job to say I couldn't be trusted and she just thought they ought to know.
Finding that out after months of mysterious rejections did nothing for my self-confidence or my cocaine consumption. In that sense, her needing my help is a vindication. She's desperate to get something done on time and done right. She needs the best, and she had to call me.
This Legacy Project she wants me to pull together is a tribute to Son's life and work. Since he died on a fundraising trip for his alma mater, she's presenting More- house College with Son's personal papers for their archives. In return, they're naming the new communications center in his honor at a big to-do on May 5. The only problem is, it's already the middle of March, the planning committee doesn't know what they're doing, and things are such a mess that they wanted to postpone the whole thing until next year. This was totally unacceptable to Beth, who told them she was bringing in a consultant to take charge of things. That would be me.
It would be my job to pull the program together, write her a speech for the occasion, and produce a quickie biographical video on Son's life. I could tell it was going to be a lot of work, but nothing I couldn't handle, especially for the kind of money she was prepared to pay. Son Shine Enterprises must be thriving. The other big plus, aside from the money, is that the project is finite. After May 5, this job is over. At that time, it is my intention to pick up my last check, buy another first-class train ticket home, and tell the weasel to remove me from his database. All I have to do between now and then is keep my wits about me and remember that, this time, whatever goes on between Beth and me is business, not personal.
4
OSNE OF THE PROBLEMS BLACK folks have is we're usually so busy making history that we don't take the time to record it. We keep forgetting that the one who shapes the story defines the hero and the hero defines the best of what a people can be. What's that African proverb about the hunter always being the good guy until the story is told by the lion? That's why Beth is donating Son's papers to Morehouse and why she's so frustrated at their seeming inability to put things in order.
The day of my arrival, Beth was scheduled to be in Macon, about an hour up the road, so we made plans to meet the next morning for breakfast. I scheduled a meeting with the Morehouse folks so I'd have an idea of what we're talking about without having to depend on Beth to give it to me straight.
Son was, in many ways, a perfect role model. He worked hard, graduated top of his class at Morehouse, and passed the bar only one year after graduating with honors from Emory Law School. It was Son who encouraged Beth to write her book and financed the whole operation so she could hold on to the rights and the profits. It was Son who started raising money for Morehouse scholarships and mentoring high school guys while Beth concentrated on the girls. It was Son who recognized the political potential of all those single mothers looking for a chance and told Beth they should have a voter registration table in the lobby wherever she spoke. It was also Son who wanted to start his own program for the brothers because he said it didn't make much sense to have a whole lot of enlightened women looking for love in the arms of a whole lot of unenlightened men.
There couldn't be a better place for Son's legacy to take shape than at the very institution where Martin Luther King Jr. first encountered the work of Mahatma Gandhi. It all sounded good on paper, but what I was encountering this afternoon was not Gandhi, but the reluctant admission that Son's Legacy Project was going nowhere fast.
“I can't believe there's been no progress at all,” I said, following the Morehouse archivist down into the bowels of the old library building.
I'm sure my tone reflected both my incredulity and my displeasure, and Mr. Freeney, a dapper little man carrying a hundred or so extra pounds on his small frame, ducked a little like he thought I might revert to universal school-yard behavior and smack him right on the back of his round, brown head.
“The college agreed to handle this months ago,” I said. “How can you tell me now you haven't even gotten started?”
“Budget cuts. There is no archival staff left,” he said gently as we came to a halt in front of a door marked storage. “There's just me. They let everybody else go. I don't know what's going to happen when I leave.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a giant ring of keys of all sizes and began searching for the right one among the many unmarked others. He tried a key that didn't fit. Tried another. No luck.
“I'm sorry,” he murmured. “I've been meaning to label these.”
The next key he tried finally fit, and he turned it with visible relief, opened the door, and flipped on the light switch. There, haphazardly stacked in brown U-Haul boxes were all that was left of Son's thirty-five years on the planet. Inside each box, I knew, were speeches, articles, letters, trip journals, smiling photographs with beaming young mothers and their sons or equally delighted corporate donors handing over the checks that made Son the college's top fund-raiser five years in a row.
But none of this was in any kind of order. The boxes hadn't even been opened since Beth's staff packed everything up and sent it all over. At this rate, there was no way anything was going to be ready for the public by the first week in May.
“All right, Mr. Freeney,” I said. I wasn't here to fuss. I was here to fix it. “I think we've got some work ahead of us.
Do you have a suggestion for how we ought to proceed?”
The dusty air in the windowless room was oppressively still. The radiator hissed and rattled, and, even with the chill in the air outside, it had to be ninety-five degrees in that room.
“I do, I do,” he said, ushering me back out into the hallway. “I think you should take over the processing of the Davis Collection.”
He must have seen the surprised look on my face because he rushed on without stopping for breath like he wanted to get it all out before I said no.
“That would simply entail going through all the materials and producing an overview of what we've got. Then, later, we can separate the professional from the personal, arrange them chronologically, cross-reference for names, events, and public honors.”
“I'm not an archivist,” I protested. “I'm here to pull the program together. This is not my responsibility.”
The idea of walking around in Son's life for the next six weeks did not appeal to me. People say that stuff about letting sleeping dogs lie for a reason: it's true.
“Mr. Freeney,” I said, “I don't think that this is a workable solution to our problem.”
He nodded slowly. “Of course I understand, but may I speak frankly?”
“Please.” “I knew Son Davis. I respected him and what he was trying to do. I went to one of his Brothers Only workshops and it changed my life.”
Mr. Freeney took out a spotless white handkerchief and wiped his face from forehead to fat little chin.
“He believed in something, Ms. Burns. He stood for something. Now those papers in there don't tell the whole story—how could they?—but they're a beginning and who knows what young man might find something there to change his life just like Dr. King found something in Gandhi and became someone who could lead his people toward freedom.”
Mr. Freeney reminded me of the movement people who were my parents' closest friends. They were still waiting for a leader to arise who would pick up where Martin and Malcolm and Medgar and all those unnamed martyrs left off. The possibility, however remote, kept them from becoming cynical, which is always the greatest threat to failed revolutionaries. Son seems to have done that for Mr. Freeney, just like Beth did it for me for a little while, and I know it's worth a lot. Cynicism is as deadly as cancer. It just takes longer to kill you.
He saw me wavering, and his voice was gentle. “I just think that his papers can be useful in a way that a big ceremony just can't. I think the legacy that truly honors Brother Davis is sitting right there in those boxes. Waiting.”
I didn't say anything to that, and we walked in silence back up the stairs to his office. I was mentally trying to calculate how many hours it would take me to go through all those boxes.
We reached Mr. Freeney's office and he pointed me toward a delicate antique rocker with a tapestry seat cushion. He eased himself into an equally delicate old swivel chair squeezed behind a classic rolltop desk. Overflowing bookcases lined the walls, and a fat calico cat was snoozing on the well-worn oriental rug. He was waiting for me to say yes or no to his proposition.
I closed my eyes, remembered the weasel, and resigned myself to the inevitable. “If it's my job to pull this collection together, then that's what I'll have to do.”
Mr. Freeney sighed with relief. “Can we shake on it to seal the deal?”
“I'll need to move the papers once I get settled,” I said. “Move them?”
The idea made him nervous. Archivists like to keep things locked up so they can't wander off.
“I'll get Ms. Davis's permission.”
He rewarded me with a smile. “Of course, of course. You can't very well work in the basement, can you?”
I shook his hand again, promising to let him know as soon as I finalized my living arrangements. We had settled the big questions. The rest of the details could wait until later. It was time for me to find a place to live.
5
IWAS LOOKING FOR A PLACE NEAR the campus so I could walk to meetings. I had rented a car, but I like to walk. My own car had been traded away for dope a year ago, and I haven't had the money to buy another one. At first, it was horrible. I bitched and moaned every time I had to leave the house and walk the three blocks to the mass transit stop. I bummed rides and tried to borrow my friends' cars until they made me stop asking.
After a while, I had no choice, so I resigned myself to it, complaining mightily all the while. Then I started seeing the same people at the station every day and started speaking to them. Before I knew it, I was enjoying the chitchat we'd exchange until the train arrived.
After a few more weeks, I even started enjoying the walk. I'd take the long way instead of the shortcut, and, pretty soon, I even started recognizing my neighbors. After I got out ofrehab, they all welcomed me back like I'd been away to war. The little old ladies around the corner actually baked me a pie and brought it over covered with a clean white dish towel like they were going to the county fair. That's the kind of community I like—a bigcity neighborhood with a small-town sensibility—and it's just like the neighborhood that surrounds this campus.
A few years ago, the idea of taking an apartment around here by choice would have been problematic at best and foolhardy at worst. The Morehouse campus, like a lot of black colleges, was then a small oasis in the midst of an area plagued with crime, drugs, homelessness, and unemployment. I never lived in this neighborhood during my five years in Atlanta, but the stories that made the news about it did not inspire confidence.
But then things started to turn around. The crime went down, and the spirit went up. The mall reopened, and restaurants were always full of paying customers. Trash on the street disappeared, and community gardens dotted the landscape. Kids walked home from school in safety, and women moved around at night without looking over their shoulders.
Ebony and Jet had both done stories, and the Washington Post hailed the area as a model for African American urban communities. I remember being struck by how vague the articles all were when it came to answering the obvious questions: How did this happen? What was the catalyst for this kind of dramatic change?
More police? The city says no change in routine patrols. Better sanitary services? City trucks come every week, just like always, but nothing extra. None of the official explanations fit here. It was a mystery and one that had intrigued me since I first heard about the transformation. If somebody has figured out a way to get a neighborhood full of black folks to live together like they have some sense, I was more than a little interested in how they did it.
There was no denying the neighborhood had undergone a startling transformation. Gone were the boardedup crack houses and overgrown vacant lots. The streets were clean of litter, homes and lawns were uniformly well tended, and garden plots, lying fallow until next month's spring planting cycle begins, were fenced off and identified with signs proclaiming their membership in the West End Growers Association. It really did have the feel of a small town, even though you could look over your shoulder and see the skyscrapers of downtown Atlanta less than ten minutes away.
I left the campus with no particular destination in mind and just walked around for a while. I wasn't nervous. I've been living in the black community all my life, and I'm very much attuned to its specific pleasures and equally specific dangers. One of the first things my mother taught me was how to tell the difference between hostile and crazy. This is an important distinction in all black environments since the insanity of American racism is too much for some black folks to handle, and we will go off, but in different ways and with different consequences for those who find themselves in close proximity at the moment of madness.
It is important to know, for example, that the guy who quotes Scripture at the top of his lungs is startling, but probably not dangerous like the steely-eyed shadow boxer who never says a word and squints at each person he passes as if deciding whether or not to throw a punch in his direction. The only ones who really scare me are the young hoodlums who claim as many co
rners as they can hold, sell as much as they can of whatever drugs we're buying, and make the streets a minefield not easily negotiated by the faint of heart.
Last time I drove through here four or five years ago after a late-night meeting on the campus, there were hardeyed young predators on every corner, and I locked my doors for fear of being carjacked before I could get back on the freeway. This time it didn't feel dangerous at all. It just felt alive.
I stopped for the light before crossing onto Ralph D. Abernathy Boulevard and looked around. The rapid transit station nearby was receiving and disgorging passengers who seemed to be a mix of students, young mothers, and working people. The presence of dreadlocked T-shirt and incense vendors, all hawking their wares with great enthusiasm and equal charm, gave the street the feel of a busy third-world market. The absence of aggressive panhandlers or dope fiends asking for spare change was a pleasant surprise.
There were, in fact, no bug-eyed addicts or angry beggars at this busy intersection. Only three young brothers in dark suits and bow ties offering Muhammad Speaks or bean pies, depending on whether you were looking to feed your head or your face.
The mall across the street was a bustling beehive of activity with people moving in and out in a constant stream. The Krispy Kreme doughnut shop was flashing a sign for “Hot Doughnuts,” and people in business suits, baggy blue jeans, and all manner of apparel in between were coming out with the long, flat box that meant they had just bought a dozen.
I turned down Abernathy, the area's main commercial strip, and kept walking. After the Krispy Kreme, I passed two men's clothing shops, a barbershop, an African import bazaar where you could also get your braids done, and a tiny Chinese take-out place. The West End News was nestled between a flower shop displaying a huge arrangement of birds-of-paradise that would have driven Aunt Abbie crazy, and a twenty-four-hour beauty salon that claimed expertise in touch-ups, blow-outs, wraps, perms, braids, waves, and weaves.