“I THINK WE can do it, man, I really think we can,” Raj said, picking up Lincoln’s manuscript, thumbing through it and then tossing it onto his desk. “It’s powerful. With the grant we just finished doing the paperwork on we could mount it in a couple of months.” The phone rang, and Raj boomed into the receiver, “Yeah I been waiting to hear from you. Where you been?” He settled back into his chair and propped his feet on his desk. Gaining Raj’s attention for a moment, Lincoln pointed to the theater area and began easing out of the office quietly.
From Raj’s office Lincoln walked onto the stage of the three-hundred-seat theater. It was ninety-eight degrees outside but the theater was as drafty as a barn. The seats faced Lincoln in various stages of disrepair, some with ripped covers, others soiled and stained. An odorous fog of plaster and paint hung over the theater from the constant need to patch and repair the building inside and out. Still it was a theater, and soon his play would unfold on its stage.
When he and Pearl arrived in New York the play possessed the same soft, rounded edges that had always characterized his work. But he had hooked up with Raj and taken the temperature of the city, talked to some other playwrights. Soon he could see and feel his work becoming bolder, edgier. Already he had notes for a more radical play, one set in a post-black-revolutionary America. Maybe the stage was the only place the revolution would happen. If that was the way it turned out he wanted to be one of the people who at least made it happen there.
Lincoln and Raj had hit it off immediately. Raj was familiar with his work, thought well of it, but, when they first met, he was between grants and had no money to bring on a resident playwright. So they just hung out together. Lincoln would stop by and they’d sit in Raj’s office or go to a nearby bar for a drink and talk for hours.
Raj Ali was a gargantuan, bearded man whose face was as pliable and surprising as a mask. Moods flitted across his visage with a volatile, frightening speed. His jokes possessed the brusqueness of a threat and his praise hungered for entry into whatever secrets the recipient had not yet revealed. Raj had served time in prison but wouldn’t talk about why, though Lincoln had heard rumors of a murder charge. While Lincoln was developing plays in the south, Raj was reading his poetry in bars, and writing over a dozen experimental/third-stream plays with themes that were rooted in African mythology and history, metaphysics and astrology, all of which he had studied in prison. With a band of supporters he had squatted in the building that now housed the theater company and Mau-Maued the borough president’s office into turning it over to them to use for a community theater.
Raj eased his huge frame onto the edge of the stage beside Lincoln and sat down.
“We’re gonna be hellified, Lincoln, you and me, just hellified,” he promised. “You just got to get a little more angry, get mad, brother, mad as hell. Black rage is the thing,” he laughed.
“Yeah, folks’ll pay to hear it but they just won’t listen,” Lincoln agreed.
“So what? I consider myself a revolutionary but there’s only so much plays can do, ask Mao or Fidel, they’ll tell you where real power comes from. But right now, Lincoln, you got the chance to be a hero. Everywhere you look the heroes are the cultural folk. And whites financing it all. Lining up on Broadway to hear us tell them to kiss our ass, now can you dig that? Only in America, man, only in America. You got bloods performing African rituals on the stage in Harlem, shuffling and jiving and slapping palms on Forty-seventh Street, casting spells and traditional dramas down in the Village and raising political hell in Brooklyn. Man, I got out of jail just in time.”
Yeah, only in America, Lincoln thought. He saw as many dashikis as three-piece suits. Every black person he knew who was in the system claimed he was only on the inside so he could change it.
Hustler, political idealogue, manipulator, call him what you like, and Lincoln had heard Raj called that and more, they sat at that moment on the stage of a theater that Raj controlled and was waiting for the city to loan him the money to renovate.
Raj had lent him books on African philosophy, history, metaphysics, as well as a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Lincoln often wondered if this intellectual and cultural exchange was Raj’s way of justifying his own choices.
The woman a man chooses to love, how many women he needs to possess, was, Lincoln felt, as accurate a barometer of his politics as the vote he cast. Raj Ali was the father of five children. The husband to two wives. Though they were not Muslim, his wives, whenever Lincoln saw them, were veiled, and long clothes swathed their bodies. Their faces were cut in two by cloth, their eyes and forehead a stunning half-moon. Yet even beneath the veils the women were not extinguished. Their uniqueness had resisted suppression. Malika’s reticent composure was elegant and staunch. She crossed the room like a Masai, her face possessing a fragile, Ethiopian beauty. Fundi’s vitality turned her veil into a kind of regalia encasing but not diluting the aura of sexual intensity that hovered around her like a perfume. Prurient interest, and plain curiosity, had blazed inside Lincoln when he’d learned of Raj’s polygamous marriage.
One afternoon he had gone to meet Raj at his house and the youngest wife, Malika, had answered the door. Though she immediately turned her head when Lincoln entered, he still saw the bruises beneath her eyes and the puffiness of her cheeks. He followed her into the living room. Moments later Raj entered the room and hurried Lincoln toward the door, saying casually over his shoulder, “I’ll be back later this evening.”
Outside in front of Raj’s car, Lincoln asked, “What happened to Malika, man, what happened?” Raj turned on Lincoln, his eyes ramming into him. “What do you mean, man, what do you mean, what happened?” The militant denial that curled in Raj’s voice, the combativeness of his stance as he stood gripping the car door, waiting for Lincoln to say more, doused Lincoln’s nascent sense of outrage at what he suspected. In a moment of cowardice that he would always remember, he shrugged and merely mumbled, “Nothing, man, forget it.” But the sight of Malika haunted him the rest of that evening.
BY THE TIME Pearl left the Ginger Man she was radiating the cozy reassuring glow that several glasses of wine shared with a friend produced. She and Simone walked to the Fifty-ninth Street subway and said good-bye in the station before heading off to catch different trains.
Later, walking along the sweltering summer streets of Harlem, Pearl fumbled in her bag and found a breath mint and popped it in her mouth. Lincoln had begun calling her a lush, making comments about the two or three glasses of wine she sometimes drank before bed, or when she came home from work, or when she was preparing for an audition. She couldn’t bear the thought of a fight about that tonight. Not with everything else. So she decided to try two mints and prayed they worked. Sometimes, she now knew from experience, they didn’t.
All the actors she’d met had something, some fix, some mantra, some charm, to get them through the bloody awfulness of their lives—the constant rejection, the requirement to sell themselves, to hustle, to always look great, to act as if they didn’t need a job when they were really desperate for work.
Some were into yoga, others meditation; some did drugs, drank; there were Jesus freaks, actors who’d been in therapy for years trying to find out why they hadn’t made it yet. She even knew some who used sex to ease the pain.
As she let herself into the lobby of their apartment building, she stopped to retrieve from the mailbox several bills, a magazine and two letters. Pearl opened Macon’s letter and read it as she trudged up the three flights to their apartment. Macon wrote that she and Courtland were thinking of leaving Greenwood to move to Boston. Courtland had applied to Harvard’s law school and she was sending out for catalogues to study sociology. She wondered in the letter how relevant school, college, would be again after all the years “in the real world.” But she finished by saying that they both felt they had to get certain pieces of paper to do the things they wanted politically.
There was also a letter from her sister, Mae Ann. When she s
at down at the kitchen table, Pearl noticed that the envelope of Mae Ann’s letter was stained and wrinkled, the stamp pasted on upside down. The letter looked as though the journey to reach her had been as tortured as the feelings it evoked in Pearl. She propped it against the sugar bowl, trying to gather the courage to open it. She had fled home, family, kith and kin, changed her name, but looking at that letter she knew none of it mattered, that she would live and die Jessie Foster.
Before leaving Atlanta, Pearl had traveled back to Columbus to say good-bye to her sister. Mae Ann and Tyrone Marshall had married a year after their first child was born and now they had two other children. Tyrone was a trucker, hauling grocery items across the south for a major chain store. A quiet young man, Tyrone was as steady and as predictable, Mae Ann complained, as a tree. He made good money but was away much of the time.
When she entered Mae Ann’s house that day, Jessie had found her brother Willie sitting on the sofa in the living room in a starched and pressed army uniform, sipping a beer. When he saw Jessie, he leaped from the sofa and hugged her saying, “My sistuh, the famous actress. Hey, yall, come, look who’s here,” he shouted to the back of the house. Mae Ann came out of the kitchen and hugged Jessie warmly.
“Well, I don’t believe my eyes! What you doing here?”
“I had to come to see you before we left.”
“Where yall off to this time?” Mae Ann asked expectantly.
“We’re going to New York to live.”
“Well, scuuuuuuuse me,” Willie and Mae Ann sang in raucous, joyous unison as Jessie settled on the sofa, blushing, flushed by the warmth of their affection.
“God, Willie, it’s been so long, too long,” Jessie said, her eyes clutching the sight of her brother’s gentle clean-shaven face, her senses overwhelmed by the scent of his starched uniform.
“Mae Ann told us everything you been doing,” Willie beamed.
“The old man would croak if he saw you now,” Junior said, entering the room noiselessly, his brittle glance rolling like marbles over Jessie. “On the way to New York City. Look like I shoulda run away too.”
“You couldn’t keep your ass outta jail long enough,” Mae Ann snorted, “that’s the only place you was running.” A huge Afro ballooned around Junior’s face, tapering into Edwardian sideburns. A toothpick hung limply from his lips.
“I’m going straight this time,” Junior said. “I’m going to Jackson next week to get into a methadone program.” He stood fingering the slender gold chain around his neck. His words were slick, unreliable, the promises dissolving as they were made.
“How long have you been out?” Jessie asked.
“Two weeks. Got out early.”
“Just make sure you don’t go back,” Mae Ann scolded him as she headed back toward the kitchen.
Junior had been jailed so often for robbing stores, stealing cars, that Jessie couldn’t recall his latest offense. But she did remember that Mae Ann had told her last year that Junior was now using drugs.
“You looking good,” Junior concluded as though Jessie was an expensive new car or fashionable suit. “I’m going to finish my dinner, I’ll be right back,” he winked at Jessie.
“They shipping me out to Viet Nam,” Willie said, reclaiming her attention, his arm thrown possessively around Jessie’s shoulder.
“You know you don’t have to go,” she told him confidently.
“What you mean I don’t have to go?”
“Lincoln and I know people who’ve left the country to avoid the draft. We know how you could get to Canada.”
“That ain’t me, Jessie, you know that ain’t me,” Willie said, shaking his head. Jessie wondered who Willie was now. In fleeing her father, she had lost Willie as well. He had been her favorite. She’d sat hour after hour on the back porch watching him carve his tiny animals, the effortless, easy affection between them offering Jessie a refuge she had rarely found in their house.
“Are you trying to prove you’re a man?” she asked, recalling their father’s brutal beating of Willie and Junior.
“Naw, it ain’t nothing like that. I just got to do my duty.”
“But it’s a bad war. We’ve got no business over there.”
“You ever heard of a good war?” Willie shot back.
“All I know is this war isn’t worth your blood.”
“Well, I’m going anyway. I go over there and I come back with plenty of benefits.”
“You still carving and drawing?” she asked hopefully.
“I ain’t got time for that no more,” he said, pulling out a picture of his girlfriend, whom he told Jessie he planned to marry when he returned.
Gently placing the photo back in his wallet, Willie said, “So this acting stuff is for real?”
“It’s for real.”
“One day you’ll be famous. That what you want, Jess?”
“She already famous,” Mae Ann said, thundering into the room. “The only Foster to make something of herself.”
They sat together in Mae Ann’s tiny neat house and talked about everything except Chester and Olive Foster. Junior sat in their midst, jittery, wired, unable to sit still, as unknown to Jessie as a stranger. Because she couldn’t bear to think about Willie’s departure, she plied him with questions about high school friends. Later in the evening, Willie and Junior left together. On Mae Ann’s front porch, Jessie hugged Willie tight and told him, “Come back, Willie, please, come back.”
“MY, MY, MY,” Mae Ann said, arranging her large frame in a chair across from Jessie. “If Chester Foster could see you now.” They had settled in the kitchen after Willie and junior left. Mae Ann’s fleshy, overweight body was concealed by a dingy robe, her hair was uneven and studded with lint.
“What’s wrong, Mae Ann?” Jessie asked softly, longing as she asked this to retrieve some measure of Mae Ann’s spunk, which their father had never been able to defeat, the crazed stubbornness that had set her hightailing it away from Davis Road, out of their father’s grasp, rebuking their mother’s silence. That fire had saved Mae Ann and now Jessie feared it was gone.
“What you mean?”
“You don’t take care of yourself, you just let yourself go.”
“What I’m gonna take care of myself for? My husband ain’t never here.”
“Willie says he’s a good man.”
“Willie married to him? Willie sleep in the bed with him?” Mae Ann asked with a grunt and a shrug. “And when he is here, don’t do nothing but sleep.”
“What’s really wrong?”
“Oh, I don’t know Jess, sometimes I don’t think this marriage business much agrees with me; motherhood don’t much either.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“You been there?”
“No, but—”
“All right, then. I just feel like running away sometimes, you know like I used to do when we was kids.”
“There was plenty to run from then. But you’re a mother now, Mae Ann, a wife, that changes everything.”
“Whole weeks go by when I feel dead, Jess, dead,” Mae Ann whispered, her eyes bright, glistening and sad. “I’m yearning for something I can feel and imagine but can’t name.”
“You ever tell Tyrone?”
“You think he’d understand?”
“Well, what is it you want?”
“I don’t know.” Mae Ann fumbled in the pocket of her robe and brought out a pack of cigarettes. When she had lit a cigarette and emitted a stream of smoke over Jessie’s head she said, her finger tracing the pattern of flowers in the plastic tablecloth as she spoke, “It’s like I want my kids, sometimes I even want Tyrone, but at the same time I want to be free.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Hell, I’d find out. Why I got to know this minute?” Mae Ann asked irritably.
“It just seems like all the married couples I know are heading for divorce these days,” Jessie said wistfully, fingering the edge of a s
traw place mat on the table. “Remember when we were kids? Nobody got divorced.”
“They couldn’t afford to,” Mae Ann laughed. “I remember asking Aunt Eva a couple of months ago if the men were better in the old days. She just laughed and said it didn’t have nothing to do with the men. The secret to them marriages was the women. They just stuck it out.”
“You and Tyrone might not have been made in heaven but you two give me hope. I hope yall can make it.”
“Hope is a funny thing, Jess. We all got to make up our own supply, can’t depend on nobody else’s. You not going by the house, are you? You not gonna risk seein him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Too bad you can’t even holler at Mama. She’d love to see you.”
“How is she?”
“All right. She ain’t working as much as she used to and is home a lot now. Daddy can’t work much cause of them headaches you gave him and I think it’s driving the two of them crazy to be alone together now that we’s all grown.”
“How’s he?”
“You know, the same old bastard he always was.”
“I’ll write you when I get settled up there.”
“You do that.”
“I will.”
“That friend of yours, Lincoln, he seems like a nice fella.”
“He is, Mae Ann. He is.”
“I could tell the time I met him he really loves you, Jess. That man loves you a lot.”
“Mae Ann, sometimes he loves me more than I can stand.”
THE NEXT morning Jessie left Mae Ann’s, intending to head straight back to Atlanta, but she found herself driving to her parents’ house instead. The street was now paved, and a veneer of progress had settled over the neighborhood. A few new houses had been built and the outhouses dismantled.
Jessie sat in the car and watched the house, wondering what she was waiting for, what or whom she hoped to see. She imagined her mother coming down the front stairs, her father walking up the street. Jessie sat, her hands clammy, wet with perspiration, the onslaught of a familiar fear making her head throb. Still, her fingers wandered now and then toward the door handle. Finally she turned around and headed toward the highway, speeding, risking a ticket, as though she had escaped for the second time in her life.
And Do Remember Me Page 9