by Julie Kibler
Anyone who thinks a seventeen-year-old is mature enough to always know the difference between a smart choice and a dumbass decision hasn’t been a mother to a seventeen-year-old. The reminder sucked. And I did blame myself, too. Why, oh why, had I left the money? I pounded a fist against the rough concrete bench, the pain of the impact hardly tempering the pounding in my head.
But then I sprang up again. Crap. While I sat there wasting time, Teague was probably leading the cops through my shop, showing them the mess I’d assumed some unknown juvenile delinquent had made.
Good Lord, I’d sent my own son to the gallows. Even minor trouble with the law could be the start of a long, hard journey for a young black man—first offense or not—and I had to keep him away from that sentence. We’d work this out on our own.
But I wasn’t letting him off the hook. I was furious. What I said, I said fast. I told Stevie in no uncertain terms to take my money and put it in a safe place. I told him if Bailey wanted to argue about that part of this mess, she could take it up with me. Then I cut our conversation short. I needed to get him off the line and have Teague call off the dogs.
15
Isabelle, 1939
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Nell suggested carrying a note from me to Robert. Her voice trembled when she said it, but she hushed me when I tried to argue.
I spent the whole evening composing a letter in my head, and the whole next morning recording it on paper. What could I say that would make a difference? He’d asked me to stay away, and I’d complied until his sister broke our miserable silent truce. I decided to blame Nell, citing her pity for our gloomy attitudes, but then decided that was the coward’s way. I tore up my letter and began again. And again. Each time I read what I’d written, I tore the previous effort into tiny shreds.
Finally, I managed an epistle that I hoped struck a balance between pitiful and courageous. Epistle, because the length was probably over the top. But I’d scrutinized it from every angle and couldn’t find anything I could bear to leave out.
Nell and I had agreed on signals. When I was ready for her to fetch the note from me, I found her in the hallway. My mother looked on, clueless as to what a tap of my index finger against my chin meant, as though I were deep in thought about something I needed to do. Nell acknowledged me with a tug on her ear, as if she were answering an itch. I returned to my room later for a “rest,” and she came for the blank sealed envelope.
“Oh, Nell, you’ve no idea what this means to me. I only hope Robert isn’t angry. He told me to stay away.”
“This was my idea,” she said. “I don’t care if he’s angry with me. I’ll just say I threatened to quit if you didn’t do it.” She stared me down. She’d never quit. “Besides, it’s just a letter.”
Maybe it was just a letter, but we both knew it held more importance than that. Her cavalier attitude freed me and tied me in knots at the same time.
* * *
I WAITED FOR Nell’s ear tug to tell me she’d brought me a response from Robert. I sunk back into my gloom when, day after day, she shook her head as we passed in the house. Eventually, her face held regret, as though she wished she hadn’t suggested the note. I couldn’t blame her. It had been worth a try, but Robert’s silence stung.
Then, early one morning, while I forced down a breakfast of dry toast and coffee at my father’s insistence, Nell entered the dining room.
“More cream, please, Nell,” my mother said, her nose buried in the social section—all she cared about in the daily newspaper. My father pored over better news of the domestic economy, the only bright light amid rumors of war, while the rest of the world tumbled into chaos over the failing Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s increasingly aggressive chancellor. I worked the crossword puzzle until he passed me the front section. He finished the puzzle while I read the news.
Nell returned with the cream pitcher and lingered, fussing over the bread basket. “That’s all,” my mother said, her voice impatient. It caught my attention. Nell eyes met mine, and she tugged her ear. I thought I might fly through the ceiling. I tapped my chin and inhaled the rest of my breakfast.
“May I be excused?” I asked.
My father regarded my plate, empty but for crumbs. “Now that’s what I like to see, ladybug. You’re feeling better. Go on.”
“Thank you, Daddy.” I counted silently and matched my steps to the rhythm, forcing myself to walk as straight and steady as I had when balancing a book on my head in the cotillion classes I’d attended at age thirteen. But after the swinging doors fell into place behind me, I clattered through the kitchen, cocking my head at Nell as I went, indicating I’d wait in the backyard.
While she finished her breakfast tasks, I paced by our old play spot, between the kitchen garden and the clothesline, where Cora—and a granddaddy oak tree—used to keep an eye on us while we played and she worked. I rose on tiptoes when I saw Nell, clasping my hands tightly at my waist to keep them polite.
Nell withdrew a tightly folded sheet of paper from her dress pocket, hidden well beneath her apron. Only one sheet, I could tell, and my cheeks burned as I remembered the stack I’d sent. But boys were different. In writing as well as in conversation, they honed their thoughts into succinct paragraphs, void of the emotional excess girls tended to.
“Hope I’ve done the right thing, Miss Isabelle.” Nell pressed Robert’s note into my hand. “I don’t know what all he has to say here.”
“But did he seem happy when you told him? And when he sent you with his answer?”
She wrinkled her nose and seemed to think back over time. “Can’t say. He’s better, but it’s almost time for college to start, so no telling. I know he’s happy about that.”
I appreciated her honesty, though I’d hoped she’d have more confidence in Robert’s pleasure at hearing from me. He’d told me to stay away, though, and I couldn’t imagine he’d changed his mind simply because I’d written him and told him I’d be happy to hear about his studies now and then, or whatever new adventures kept him busy at school.
But I intended to wear him down until he couldn’t stand not seeing me any more than I could stand not seeing him. Perhaps it was desperate and selfish. I suppose I was desperate and selfish.
Robert’s first letter honored my request—a dry replay of his activities since he’d finished work on the wall. No more, no less. Eyes not meant to see it couldn’t have faulted what he reported, even if they’d discovered the note lying about. He didn’t even address it personally—no “Dear Isabelle” or salutation of any kind. He dated the corner and signed it, simply, “Robert Prewitt.” Anyone might have mistaken it for a journal entry carried by accident into our house. Of course, if they’d discovered it between the pages of whatever I happened to be reading, it would have raised eyebrows.
So it went, into fall. I began my last year at school, and Robert started at the Negro college fifty miles away in Frankfort. He traveled home most weekends. I knew to expect letters only on Sundays or Mondays—or two weeks in between when he remained at school to study for exams or write papers. Our letters began to overlap, which could be confusing when their delivery crisscrossed.
Robert’s remained impersonal, but over time, another tone crept in, and the way he shared about his classes and classmates and the things he learned expressed not only the facts but also his feelings about them. Then one day, I sat down with a thump on the floor of my room, where I’d been pacing while reading his latest, so shocked was I to notice he’d used the personal pronoun you. If someone found this letter, they’d no longer be fooled into thinking it was a journal entry. To my joy, he’d slipped up and addressed me as a human being. I hugged the letter to my chest, my hands wrapped around the backs of my arms. I felt as though I’d been embraced.
Now I dared pour even more of my feelings into my letters, mentioning often how I missed seeing him and how I wished things were different. Another day, another shift occurred. He admitted he missed me, too, more than ever, and believed
his head would burst with thoughts of being with me, of walking together openly, of holding hands. A burning made its way from deep in my belly to my heart when I read his words.
We saw each other a few times after that. Nell alerted me to Robert’s long weekends home, and we met at the arbor, though it was chilly and often damp and muddy from rain—and the threat of snow as winter approached. I’d claim a study date with a friend after school on the Thursdays Robert arrived, then would hurry after the final bell to meet him there. Our rendezvous were innocent, mainly spent gazing at each other with great silly grins, stumbling over our words in a hurry to share everything we didn’t dare mention in letters. At visit’s end, we shared chaste yet passionate kisses before parting—no more than our first kisses after the revival.
But, of course, after each visit and kiss, I found it more difficult to return to life as usual. I existed on two planes, two separate lives—one, the same I’d led forever, yet where I felt like an alien now, walking as I did in a daze, as though I no longer fit in the spaces I’d once occupied well enough, even if always slightly off-kilter. The other felt like real life, and I lived for the moments when I could transfer myself into that reality by repeatedly reading letters from Robert or spending what stolen moments we could arrange.
After a late fall visit, I needed a glimmer of hope it wouldn’t end.
“I pray every night we’ll find a way to be together,” I told him, leaning into him for another embrace after we’d already said it was the last that day. “There has to be a way, one that won’t cause trouble for your family or put anyone in danger. There has to be.” My voice broke.
Even as he drew me into his arms, he scoffed, gently, yet with impassable resignation. I knew in my heart it was fantasy, but his scoff hurt more than I could graciously bear.
I jumped up from the bench he’d covered with his jacket so moisture wouldn’t ruin my skirt and walked furiously away, at first toward home, but then in a direction I’d never gone, down a path worn through dense woods. I wanted to be alone, away from anything familiar. But Robert came after me, struggling to shove his arms into his damp jacket while he tried to keep up.
Finally, he caught me, grasped my arm from behind, and halted me in the middle of the woods. His jacket flapping, he tugged me to him and pressed my cheek hard to his chest, so tight his heart pounded against my pulsing temple. I breathed deeply until their rhythms almost matched—or at least until they weren’t in opposition, and the chaos in my head calmed, too.
“I don’t know how to do this, Isabelle. I can’t promise anything but the next letter, or the next visit. You knew when you sent me that first note after I told you to stay away that all I could offer was the present. The moment we’re given. That’s all we’ve ever been sure of.”
His speech was more refined each time I saw him. College had polished him, revealing a gleaming gem. I wouldn’t have cared if he still spoke like his mother or sister at times, dropping consonants or using the wrong verb tenses—that was the young man I’d fallen in love with—but I considered him now, marveling that anyone could find anything lacking in him. He was the perfect match—except for the color of his skin, beautiful and precious as the black sapphire in my mother’s wedding ring. Color was all that stood between us. The injustice made me want to scream. I wanted to climb the highest hill I could find and shout until our world saw its error. But I came to a crossroads that afternoon. I rendered a promise in my heart, and I said it out loud. It was my time to turn him away.
“I’m finished with this, Robert. The sneaking around. The hiding. The way my heart breaks, little by little, when I believe this is all we’ll ever have. It’s not enough anymore. And I won’t see you again. Not until we find a way to be together.”
I understood now what I hadn’t before the letters, before I fell deeper in love with him. Our relationship as it stood, the creeping around behind our families’ backs to steal conversation and kisses, could only continue so long before we’d both hover at the brink of insanity.
Now it was Robert who watched in disbelief as I turned and left him, this time without even a handkerchief to tuck close to his heart, clinging only to my pitiful pledge.
I didn’t regret the deal I’d made. It only made me angrier at the situation and more determined to conjure a plan to bring us back together. I schemed and plotted for weeks, considering such ridiculous ideas as staining my skin with permanent dye and taking on a new identity. Laughable? Yes. I was that desperate.
One day, though, a guest speaker came to my school. The teachers were concerned that the boys in my community lacked ambition, that they’d be drawn too easily into the organized-crime gangs that had begun to infiltrate even our quiet town, creeping up the hill from Newport like a contagious disease. They found easy work running errands for the bosses—making deliveries, acting as valets at the mob-run Beverly Hills Country Club just off the highway. Our principal invited career men to speak to our class. We girls were expected to listen quietly or study while our guests answered our male classmates’ questions. This plan was fine, in theory, but a visiting attorney from Cincy—some uncle or cousin of our teacher—met a wall of silence when it was time for the boys to quiz him about his work.
I poked my hand up, disregarding my teacher’s displeasure, until the man noticed me. “Yes, young lady? Have a question about how to meet and marry one of our bright young associates, do you?”
I ignored my friends’ titters and my teacher’s glare. “Mr. Bird? I know you need to go to college, but what must you know to be an attorney?”
He seemed taken aback by my question, which was not simple, and which came, of all things, from a girl. Finally, he recovered. “Well, Miss…”
“McAllister. Isabelle McAllister.”
“Miss McAllister, when your young men here enroll in various fine law schools after completing their baccalaureate degrees, they will read and study more than they ever imagined while sitting here in class, so spoiled have you all been.”
I doubted my teacher appreciated his remark or the scare tactic—it likely negated any effect she and her colleagues hoped for in motivating the lazy boys. But I voiced another question before she could distract him. “Reading and studying what, sir?”
“The law.” He said it simply and ominously, as though referring to the Bible. As though every conclusion could be drawn from his short answer.
“The law?” I said, hoping he would elaborate.
“You, child, have no idea how many volumes reside in the libraries of the best law schools in the United States. Trained reporters painstakingly record the details of each case—the facts, the issues, the precedents, and the decisions.”
“And in order to know what the law is, you’d have to read every one of these books?”
I wasn’t sure I understood. But I’d piqued the visiting attorney’s curiosity by then. I didn’t suppose a girl had ever questioned him this way, and he seemed determined now to give me a satisfactory answer. “We start with the U.S. Constitution. It has jurisdiction over every American state and city. But what is not defined in the Constitution is defined by individual states and municipalities. I suppose you could go to any local government office and request a copy of its laws. You might even find constitutional and local law in a public library—if it’s a fairly large one. But, my dear, the trick lies in interpreting the law. That’s what attorneys and judges do. We learn the laws, then try to apply them fairly. In the process, new laws are created.”
He had no idea that, curious as I was, I’d tuned him out by the time he reached the end of his answer. I needed only a simple answer to a simple question: if and where Robert and I could legally marry. His lengthy explanation contained the one detail I’d hoped for. We’d learned the Constitution in school, and it said nothing about marriage.
Before that day, I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that each state made its own rules about many things. But it had never occurred to me that while marriage between a Negro
and a white was illegal in Kentucky, it might not be elsewhere.
My teacher eyed me as I gathered my books and schoolwork at the end of the day, then shook her head and went back to cleaning the blackboard.
Later that week, I forged a note to the school office, saying I’d miss classes the following day to accompany Mother on out-of-town family business. The secretary hardly glanced at it before sending it on to my teacher.
The next morning, I started for school as always, but when I reached downtown, I turned the other direction, boarded a streetcar that would connect me to another that would carry me into Cincinnati proper, where I’d visit the office that issued marriage licenses. I had a question.
16
Dorrie, Present Day
I WAS TOO embarrassed to call Teague after all. I texted him, crossing my fingers he’d confirm he received my message right away. If he didn’t, I’d have no choice but to talk to him.
“Teague. Big mistake. Please tell police never mind. Don’t want to press charges.”
The message was like an old-fashioned telegram. I didn’t have time or energy for more.
He tried to call me back immediately, but I ignored Marvin Gaye’s sultry voice. I couldn’t face Teague, even over the phone. I knew once I explained what happened, he’d take off as fast as his never-ending legs could carry him. Volunteering to help me with the sorry actions of a stranger was one thing. Dragging him into my mess of a son’s new career in crime was altogether different.
Pretty soon, the text messages started.
“Um … okay?” said the first.
Then: “Dorrie, what happened? I did what you asked, but I don’t get it.”
“You still want me to fix the door, right?”
“Dorrie. Call me. Please? I’m worried about you.”
“Dorrie?”