by Pearl Cleage
I know, I know! Sue me! I told you I was the child of movement people. It's in my blood and Beth gave me a place to focus all that energy. I had loved it until she changed up on me and started selling herself to the highest bidder. When I saw her urge an auditorium full of first-time black female voters to cast their ballots for a good ol' boy who still called his secretary “sweetie face,” I knew it was time to move on.
But by that time, I was in love with Son, so I stayed, and I stayed too long. The worst thing a true believer can do is to stick around once the bloom is off the rose, and by the time Beth accused me of disloyalty, she was right. I had stopped believing in her, but I was still on the payroll, so who was I to criticize? All things considered, we were probably about even.
“I'll take care of it,” I said. “And the speech and the video, too, but first you have to promise me two things.”
She took a small white handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose delicately. “What's that?”
“No more spying,” I said. “If you want to know something about me, ask me.”
“Fair enough,” she said, dabbing at the corners of her eyes. “What else?”
“Let's start from today,” I said. “We can't change what happened, or what we think about it, but I did some of my best work with you. That's why you called me, and that's part of why I'm here. We both know I need the money, but I'd like to finish up the way I started, at the top of my game.”
Beth just looked at me for a moment, then she reached into her jacket pocket and took out a check, discreetly folded in the middle, and handed it to me.
“Welcome back,” she said with a thin smile. “Now, shall we have some breakfast?”
“No, thanks,” I said, standing up and dropping the check in my purse without looking at the amount. “I rented a place near the campus yesterday and I want to get settled in this morning.”
“Near the campus?”
She looked surprised, just like I knew she would.
“Are you sure you'll be safe over there? You know that neighborhood is pretty rough.”
Rough? I thought about the people rushing in and out of the mall and waiting patiently in line at the Krispy Kreme. I remembered the ladies at the beauty shop and the young woman walking beside her tiny son and the people rushing toward the rapid rail station. I thought about Aretha with her Bob Marley music and that studious-looking young guy reading the South China Morning Post and waiting for his cappuccino at the West End News. None of them looked particularly rough to me. They just looked like people.
“I'll be fine,” I said. “My landlord personally guaranteed my safety.”
She snorted at that. “You must have some landlord. He ought to be chief of police.”
“His name is Blue Hamilton,” I said, walking with her toward the door. “Ever heard of him?”
“Blue Hamilton, the singer?”
Beth sounded surprised, but no more than I was. My visionary adviser was on the money again. “He's a singer?”
“Used to be. Dark skin, high cheekbones, blue eyes?”
“You know him?”
“Not personally,” she said. “That's your landlord?”
“Handed me the keys himself.”
“He still got those eyes?”
“Still got 'em,” I said. “They're pretty amazing, actually. What kind of singer was he?”
“R and B. A crooner, I guess you'd call him. Sort of a cross between Marvin Gaye and Al Green.”
The idea of my ocean-eyed landlord singing like Al Green sent an involuntary tingle down my spine. “Was he any good?”
“He had one big hit when he was a kid, fifteen or sixteen, I guess. After that …” She shrugged. “Good thing he put his money in real estate. He was a real one-hit wonder.”
Beth opened the door, and the softness of the air promised that spring was right around the corner.
“I'll call you tomorrow,” I said, heading for my little rental car.
“Gina?”
Her tone stopped me as I was halfway into the car. “Yes?”
“I only ever wanted the best for Son,” she said. “You know that, don't you?”
“Me, too,” I said, and closed the car door behind me before she could prolong a moment that had no place to go but wrong.
We had agreed to let bygones be bygones. Beth and I don't have to agree on her role in Son's life, or where she was now leading her followers, or what my landlord was or is now. I know that Son would have been better off telling his mother the truth, and I know Beth's work suffers when her ego gets in the way, but most of all I know this: Blue Hamilton may be many things, but a one-hit wonder is not among them.
9
ITOOK MR. FREENEY UP ON HIS offer to help me move all that stuff from the campus to my apartment, and the next day, three well-built, but less-than-enthusiastic Morehouse students showed up at my door with a van full of boxes. I had the guys stack everything in the office, but there were so many cartons that I finally had to put some in the living room, too.
Once I tipped them each an unexpected twenty and made their collective day, the reality of what I was getting ready to do walked in and sat down beside me. Part archivist and part private detective, my job was going to require me to walk around, unannounced, in my exlover's life. In the abstract, I had considered mainly the time it would take to do it and the blessing of the money.
Beth's first check was for ten grand. I kept two to live on and sent the rest overnight mail to the weasel, but sifting through Son's life meant sifting through parts of mine, too. I had to get ready for that so I wouldn't be taken by surprise when a photograph or a memo or a journal entry stirred up memories I had worked hard to put to rest.
I also had to be on the lookout for any information that Beth might consider damaging. I wasn't responsible for censoring anything. I was only charged with bringing to her attention anything that might not present Son in the most positive light. That didn't seem too difficult, but it was a level of snooping that made me a little uncomfortable. Son was my friend first, probably my best friend for almost three years before we segued into something else, and I respected him, imperfections and all.
It was a beautiful afternoon and the light Aretha had used as a selling point when she first showed me this place was pouring through the windows. What was I worrying about? Nothing. Everything was going great. I've been here only a week and I've already settled into a great apartment, made peace with Beth, gotten paid, and started working. If there ever was a time to take myself out for lunch to say, Good job, Gina, this was it.
I stepped out onto the small balcony to see whether I needed a coat or just a sweater. It was clear and almost balmy. There were few people out besides the mailman on his rounds, but a few doors down the street, some aspiring sax player was attempting the John Coltrane arrangement of “My Favorite Things” with disastrous results. If this had been a movie, the anonymous sax player would have had club-quality chops, and his impromptu performances would have drawn in listeners, just like hearing Marley had drawn me to this very house. But this ain't the movies, and this may very well be the worst saxophone player I have ever heard.
I stepped back inside, grabbed a light jacket, and headed out for the main drag. I had passed a couple of restaurants on my recent walking tour, and I'll bet one of them has a special that includes the macaroni and cheese I've been craving. As I locked my door, I couldn't help listening for any sound from across the hall. The fish must be biting big time because I hadn't seen any sign of Blue Hamilton since he dropped me off at Paschal's. Not that it was any of my business. Visions aside, the last thing I wanted to do was distract myself with a man. That's what got me in all this trouble in the first place.
When I stepped out of the bright blue front door (which still made me smile every time I looked at it) I could hear wanna-be Coltrane still plugging away. It was so bad I actually stopped to see if I could hear one note that belonged where it found itself.
“Pretty ba
d, huh?”
I turned to see a woman standing in the garden with her arms full of collard greens. She was about my age with her hair pulled back into two French braids and no makeup on her smooth, cocoa brown face. She was dressed like a farmer: bib overalls, denim jacket, yellow rubber boots that had seen better days. But it was her smile that caught my eye and held it. She had the deeply sweet smile of someone who is so plugged in to the good in people that evil never occurs to her.
“The worst,” I said, grinning at the accuracy of her musical assessment. “I hope he keeps his day job.”
She laughed. “I think this is his day job!”
She picked her way out of the collards, shifted the harvested bundle to the crook of one arm, and held out her hand. She was wearing gardening gloves with the fingers cut off. “I'm Flora Lumumba. Downstairs, right.”
“Regina Burns,” I said. “I just moved in upstairs.”
“Aretha told me. You get settled in okay?”
I nodded. “Are you responsible for these beautiful collard greens?”
“I don't know how beautiful they are this time of year,” she said, smiling. “This is the last of the lot. But wait until July. Nobody can touch these gardens in the summer.”
“I'd like to see that.”
“You will,” she said, still smiling.
My stomach growled to remind me I had been on my way to lunch. The idea of company suddenly appealed to me.
“I'm going to grab some lunch,” I said. “Would you like to join me?”
“I'd love to,” she said. “Come on in while I put these greens away. Have you been to Soul Vegetarian yet?”
“I haven't been anywhere yet.”
“If you don't need meat, Soul Veg is great, and it's only a couple of blocks.”
“Sounds great.”
I followed her into her apartment, a cozy, colorful nest with lots of pillows, lots of books, and a couple of baskets of knitting sitting beside a comfortable chair in front of the TV. There were some very healthy house plants around, including one exotic flowering beauty that I couldn't identify. There were framed travel posters on the wall, featuring the kind of sparkling blue water and white sand beaches that make you leave home in the first place, looking for paradise three days and two nights at a time.
When we walked in, Erykah Badu was on the CD player telling her clueless boyfriend he better call Tyrone. Flora laughed and turned it down a little.
“That song cracks me up. ‘But you can't use my phone,’” she sang along and laughed again, dropping the greens in the sink and spraying them lightly with cold water. “These young girls are fearless. When I listen to the music my daughter, Lu, listens to, I understand why they talk so much stuff!”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Eleven going on thirty,” she said, rolling her eyes and reaching for a photograph on the front of the refrigerator. The picture showed a laughing young girl making rabbit ears behind the head of a man who was standing beside her wearing a father's indulgent grin. “She'd kill me for telling you this, but she started her period today.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “Or should I be saying that to her?”
She shook her head, grinning. “Who knows? This is a first for me. Other than my own, of course.”
“Where is she?”
“At school! When she called to tell me, I asked her if she wanted me to come and get her and she said no. She got a pad from one of her girlfriends.”
The girl in the photograph looked like a little kid to me, but now she was a little kid capable of having a kid. It struck me that men bond over contests where one dominates the other, directly or through the NFL surrogates. We bond over the things that define our lives as women: our periods, our pregnancies, our men, our children.
“So how does it feel to have a daughter who's almost grown?”
“A little intimidating,” Flora said, shaking the greens and covering them with paper towels to absorb some of the moisture. “But you know who's not going to be ready for this at all?”
“Who?”
“Her dad. That's him in the picture with her. He thinks she's going to be his baby girl forever.”
Lu's father was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a ruddy complexion and a large old-fashioned afro that framed his face in a perfect circle of sandy-colored hair.
She had inherited her father's complexion and her mother's smile.
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Not me. She can tell him if she wants to, but unless she's ready for him to fly in with a chastity belt, I'd advise her to keep it to herself.” She looked at me, patting the greens. “Did you tell your father?”
My father was an intensely shy man whose desire for human companionship began and ended with my mother.
I shook my head. “No way. I don't think I ever said the word period in front of him.”
“I didn't have a chance to decide. My mother told my dad and then they both sat me down and had this excruciating conversation with me about how they trusted me to act like a lady and not bring any babies home for them to raise.”
I groaned. “What did you say?”
“I said I wouldn't!” She laughed. “What do you think I said?”
Flora squeezed the greens into the refrigerator, and I handed her back the photograph.
“Hank's still in Detroit,” she said, returning it to its place on the refrigerator. “That's where we live, but Hank got a big case where they really have a chance to send some crack dealers away for a long time, and it just got too dangerous. So Hank sent us down here to stay with Blue. He knew we'd be safe here.”
I'll bet. “Your husband's a lawyer?”
“A prosecutor. One of the best.” Love and pride shone through in her voice and her deep brown eyes. “They've been after these guys for years, but they're not going down easy. I could take the phone calls. After a while you get used to that, but when they threw a fire bomb in Lu's window in the middle of the night, I just freaked.”
“They threw a fire bomb in your house?”
It sounded like a sixties story, but it wasn't. No white folks around this time. Just us.
“We weren't hurt, thank God, but we lost a ton of stuff. I was handling it pretty well, I think, but then I realized they had burned up our wedding pictures. That's when I really started bawling, but then Hank said don't even trip about some pictures because all he had to do was look in my face and he could see that whole day in his mind, just like it was a movie or something.”
She touched the photograph lightly with her fingertips. “I know somebody has to stand up and say there are still men here, and I'm really proud of everything Hank's doing, but we've been here since October and it seems like forever.”
She stepped out of her gardening boots and into a pair of equally well-worn clogs. “How long are you going to be here?”
“Not long,” I said, feeling like I had moved into some kind of halfway house for women in need of safe haven. “I have to finish my project by May fifth and then I'll go back to Washington.”
“Oh!”
She seemed surprised.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just thought Blue said you were going to be here longer than that.”
“He must have misunderstood me.”
She shook her head. “Blue doesn't misunderstand. He must have another plan in mind for you.”
“What kind of plan?” How could he have a plan for me? He didn't even know me.
“Who knows? Blue is always plotting something. He never tells you until you walk up on it yourself, then he asks what took you so long.” She smiled and picked up her keys. “Ready?”
10
THE SOUL VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT is nestled between a store selling traditional African clothing and a banquet hall whose price list for wedding receptions, graduation, anniversary, and Kwanzaa parties, and the occasional high school reunion was posted in the window. I told Flora I was doing a project at the school about
the life and work of Son Davis, and she was pleased to hear it.
“He deserves that,” she said. “I never met him, but the way his mother writes about him, and from all I've read, he seemed like a good man. He was always talking to the men as hard as his mama was talking to the women, which is the only way it makes sense to me.”
When we stepped inside the restaurant, the spicy aromas and warm atmosphere appealed to me immediately. This was clearly my new favorite restaurant. The people who work here seemed to be part of some organization that has black entrepreneurship as part of its overall mission to uplift the race. They are soft-spoken, neatly dressed, and have the slightly self-congratulatory air that descends on some folks when they stop eating meat, even though they're still wearing leather shoes.
I ordered the eggplant casserole because I couldn't resist the thick layer of cheese on top and a ginger beer that was so spicy it brought tears to my eyes. Flora, who was clearly a regular, got the collard green quiche, applecarrot juice, and a cup of jasmine tea. The booth near the window was open, and we took it. The food tasted even better than it looked, and for a minute we just enjoyed our choices. But my brain was still swirling around what she'd said back at her apartment, and I eased it back into the conversation.
“What did you mean about Mr. Hamilton having a plan for me?” I still felt forward calling him Blue.
“I didn't mean to make it sound sinister,” she said, with a reassuring smile, “but I've known Blue for fifteen years. I know how his mind works. That's how he got me to take charge of the gardens.”
She took a bite of her quiche and pointed her fork at the layer of collards in the custard. “These are my greens. My gardeners supply this place with all their vegetables in the summer. In the winter, all we can do are greens, but come summer? Our tomatoes are legendary!”
“Tell me about the gardens,” I said, taking a tiny sip of my ginger beer, and hoping this would give me some idea about what kind of plan we were talking about.