She didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded and thought, Boy, were you right about this one, Clarice.
“You’ll be done with school in a couple months and you’ve probably been thinking about what’s ahead for you.”
Lester was wrong about that. While Barbara Jean had been raised to always have an eye out for the next opportunity—“You got to be a forward-thinkin’ woman if you wanna get anywhere in this world,” her mother always said—she had done nothing but try not to think about the future since the day she first kissed Chick Carlson in the hallway of the All-You-Can-Eat. And it was becoming increasingly difficult to do. Practically every night, Chick whispered his dreams to her as she lay in his bed with her head resting on his chest. Chick had been reading about cities where they could be together. He made it sound so easy, so possible. They would slip off together to one of the mixed-marriage Promised Lands, maybe Chicago or Detroit, and everything would be perfect. Barbara Jean wanted to fantasize along with him, but where Chick imagined minor inconveniences that they could link arms and breeze right past, Barbara Jean saw impassable obstacles of race, ignorance, and rage. So she let Chick talk about an idyllic tomorrow, but she blocked out his words and only listened to the sound of his heartbeat.
Lester continued, “I just want you to know that I’d like to be a part of your thinking. I’ve got a fair amount of money. And if things go the way I believe they will, I’ll have a lot more soon. I could certainly take care of you and give you anything you might want. Not that I’m trying to buy you, or anything like that. I just thought you should know that I can take care of you right. I could even buy you Ballard House and fix it up for you, if you want. I remember how much you said you liked it.”
“I did?” Barbara Jean asked, not recalling having said any such thing.
“Yeah, that first time you rode in my car, when we passed by the house you said, ‘Look at that place. I’d love to live in something like that.’ ”
Barbara Jean had thought that very thing every time she passed the house, but she didn’t realize she had ever said it out loud. But Lester had heard her and remembered all these months later. It touched her heart.
“You don’t have to decide anything right now. I know this probably isn’t what you were expecting to hear from me today,” he said. “I’m going to be away in Indianapolis for the next week and a half to do some business. You can think about it and give me an answer when I get back.”
The only words Barbara Jean could think to say were “Thank you, Lester.” So she left it at that.
Lester took his hand away from her shoulder. Then he leaned in and planted a kiss on her cheek. He slid away from her and hopped out of the car. Then he walked around to the passenger side and opened it. Again, she said, “Thank you, Lester.”
She hurried up the walkway to Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s house without glancing back and she let herself in. As she climbed the stairs to her room, Barbara Jean thought of her mother. When Loretta was dying, she had spent hours looking back at her life and listing the ways the world had wronged and cheated her. The main thing she had been denied was “a man who could look me in the eye and swear that he’d be my man forever and that he would always do right by me and my baby.” Now, after what Lester had just said to Barbara Jean in his car, she heard the voice of her mother panting in her ear, “This is it, girl, what we been waitin’ for.”
When she got to her room that night and peered out of the window, she saw that the light was on in the storeroom of the All-You-Can-Eat. But she pulled down her window shade and didn’t go to see Chick.
For two days, Barbara Jean kept what Lester had said to her all to herself, hoping that an answer would come if she thought about it long enough. She stayed behind her locked bedroom door and avoided everyone. If asked, she claimed to be sick, which was half true because holding her secret inside made her stomach churn throughout each of those days. And her shade remained drawn, because she knew that if she stared too long at the storeroom light across the street, she would run to Chick and the decision would be made for her.
Finally she had to let it out, so she called a meeting of the Supremes. In the gazebo behind Odette’s house, the very one that she and Chick had sneaked off to so many times, she told Odette and Clarice about Lester’s proposal.
Clarice was overjoyed. She said, “See? See? I told you Lester was interested in you. You told him yes, didn’t you?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
“What’s there to think about?” Clarice asked. “There’s not a colored woman in town who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have Lester. Veronica’s been trying to get him to notice her since she was thirteen. You’d better lay claim to him while you can, or somebody else’ll beat you to it.”
Odette didn’t say a word while Clarice went on and on about Lester’s proposal as if it were the greatest thing that had ever happened to anyone in the world. Barbara Jean thought that Clarice sounded as excited about this as she did when she talked about herself and Richmond. Clarice stood up from the wooden bench that lined the lattice walls of the gazebo and walked in a tight circle, already planning Barbara Jean’s wedding.
Clarice named ten girls from their high school, in descending order of height, who would make the best bridesmaids. She rattled off a full menu of foreign-sounding foods Barbara Jean had never heard of, freely spending Lester’s money.
Barbara Jean asked her to stop, saying that she had to think about it. Clarice countered, “Lester is a nice guy, and he has all kinds of money. He’s a little on the short side, but he’s handsome. I don’t see what’s holding you back. Do you, Odette?”
That was when Odette said it, just as casual as can be. “Well, Barbara Jean’s in love with Chick.”
Clarice said, “Chick? What are you talking about?”
“They’ve been together for months. Don’t you have eyes, Clarice?”
Barbara Jean stared at Odette, unnerved by what her friend had just said. Being in love with James seemed to have imbued Odette with a hypersensitivity to other people’s feelings that hadn’t been there before. This new, greater power of observation, combined with Odette’s tendency to say what was on her mind, made her kind of spooky in addition to being a pain in the neck.
Clarice turned to Barbara Jean and asked, “Is that true?”
Barbara Jean was going to lie, but she looked at Odette’s face. Odette cast her open, accepting gaze on Barbara Jean and the truth came on out. Barbara Jean described the first time she kissed Chick. She told them about the nights they had shared in the storeroom. She repeated to them what Chick had said to her about the two of them running away together to Chicago or Detroit, how couples like them weren’t a big deal there and they could get married.
Odette said, “You should go talk to Big Earl, see what he has to say about it.”
“I can’t do that. What am I going to say? ‘Guess what, Big Earl, I’ve been sneaking out of the house you invited me into and going over to fuck the white busboy in your storeroom.’ I can’t have him thinking of me that way. I can’t have him thinking I’m like …”
Barbara Jean stopped there, but Clarice and Odette both knew how that sentence ended.
Clarice always thought of herself as the most practical of the three of them. She said, “Chick’s sweet. And he’s good-looking. But he’s got no money and no prospects that I can see. Plus, there’s his brother to think about.”
They had all seen Desmond Carlson driving slowly past the All-You-Can-Eat in his red truck at least once a week over the past several months. He never came inside the restaurant to cause trouble; Big Earl wouldn’t have tolerated anything like that, and Desmond knew it. But if he caught sight of his brother through the window as he cruised by, he made obscene gestures and called his brother out to fight before eventually giving up and speeding away.
Clarice said, “That crazy redneck brother of Chick’s will track you both down and kill you even if you make it to Chicago or Detr
oit.”
Barbara Jean didn’t respond to that because the truth of it was clear. And it wasn’t only Desmond Carlson. There were plenty of folks in Plainview, black and white, who’d happily have seen Chick and Barbara Jean dead rather than see them together. That was just how things were.
When the silence stretched out a while longer, Clarice assumed that the debate was over and that Barbara Jean had seen that she was right. She went back to planning a huge spectacle of a wedding for Barbara Jean. Clarice kept it up during the ride from Odette’s house and didn’t stop until Barbara Jean jumped out of her car in front of Big Earl’s.
In her heart, Barbara Jean knew Clarice was right; there was only one choice that made good sense. But the gorgeous picture Clarice painted of a hand-embroidered wedding dress with a ten-foot lace train battled an even more exquisite image in Barbara Jean’s head, the vision of what she truly wanted.
In the years that came later, Barbara Jean would imagine what might have happened if she had been more like Odette when she was young. Maybe if she’d had more courage, she could have told common sense to kiss her ass and run straight at that sweet vision of a life with Chick in Detroit or Chicago or anywhere. Maybe if she had been braver, her boy would have lived.
Chapter 25
On April 4, 1968, the night after Barbara Jean talked with Odette and Clarice in Mrs. Jackson’s gazebo, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis. Both Chicago and Detroit, the potential escape routes for Chick and Barbara Jean, went up in flames.
Barbara Jean, Miss Thelma, and Little Earl watched TV as a parade of solemn white male faces tried to explain to white America just what had been lost that day. Big Earl came home late that night. As soon as he’d shut the front door, Miss Thelma asked, “Where you been? I saw the lights go out over across the street almost an hour ago. You had me worried.”
“I drove Ray to his brother’s place,” he said.
“What? You went over there with them crazy-ass hillbillies? Are you outta your mind?”
Big Earl said, “Those folks are too damn happy to be thinkin’ about me, or Chick, or anything but their good news. Besides, there was some trouble over at the restaurant, and I didn’t want him to be there by himself all night.”
Miss Thelma saved Barbara Jean from having to ask what had happened by saying, “What kinda trouble?”
“Not much, just Ramsey and some of his friends actin’ stupid. They lost what little sense they have and decided they had to beat down a white man. So Ramsey started in on Ray.”
Barbara Jean’s heart began pounding so hard that she was sure everyone in the room could hear it.
Miss Thelma asked, “Ray all right?”
Big Earl laughed. “He’s fine. Odette and James was there, and they stepped into it. Make that girl mad and you got somethin’ fierce on your hands. I had to pull her off of Ramsey myself. And he’s gonna have a nasty black eye tomorrow. That’ll teach ’im not to act a fool.”
“No, it won’t,” Miss Thelma said.
Big Earl nodded. “You’re right. It won’t.”
“You shoulda brought Ray over here to stay, ’stead of takin’ him to his brother,” Miss Thelma said.
“I asked, but he said he didn’t wanna come. Something’s goin’ on with him.”
When Big Earl said that, Barbara Jean could’ve sworn he was staring at her. But she told herself it had to be her imagination; she hadn’t been able to think straight since Lester had asked her to marry him. As she sat with the McIntyres and took in replay after replay of the ugly story on the TV news, she thought about the boy she loved, sitting in a cold shack in a section of town where people were at that moment firing shotguns into the air in celebration.
Plainview shut down in the days after Dr. King was killed. The university was so afraid that its handful of black students would start a riot that classes were canceled. Some white neighborhoods put up barricades. People were afraid to travel about, so businesses temporarily closed their doors. Some business owners who had seen what was happening in big cities around the country stayed in their places twenty-four hours a day with shotguns on their laps, waiting for looters. Big Earl was one of the few people who understood from the beginning that Plainview wasn’t going to explode. He kept his restaurant open every day.
The afternoon after Dr. King died, Barbara Jean stopped by the All-You-Can-Eat. Clarice met her just inside the door. She grabbed Barbara Jean’s arm and pulled her toward their window table, where Odette sat waiting. After she led Barbara Jean to her seat, words rushed from Clarice’s mouth. “I’m so sorry, Barbara Jean. The only person I told was my mother.”
Barbara Jean didn’t understand what Clarice was saying at first. But she figured it out fast enough when she glanced around and realized that most of the eyes in the room were on her. She realized then that she was looking at a restaurant full of people who knew her secrets.
“Jesus Christ, Clarice,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Everybody was so upset last night. I was trying to think of good things to keep our minds off of the bad stuff on TV and it just slipped out. Mother said she wouldn’t tell, but she must’ve told Aunt Glory and Aunt Glory must’ve told Veronica. And, well, you know that Veronica. She’s got such a big mouth.”
Odette spoke for the first time. “Veronica’s got a big mouth?” Then Odette slapped Clarice’s arm so hard it made her cry out, “Ouch!”
Veronica and two other girls from school started walking their way. As they came closer, Clarice whispered, “I never said a word about Chick, I swear to God. Just Lester.”
Veronica smirked that way people do when they know more of someone else’s business than they should. She said, “So your work paid off, I guess. I’ve got to hand it to you. It didn’t even look like you were trying. So, when’s the wedding?”
Her friends joined in asking questions. They didn’t really care if Barbara Jean responded at all. This was the stage of gossip when getting the facts from the horse’s mouth only interfered with the fun of it all.
Barbara Jean couldn’t have answered anyway; she was too busy looking around the room for Chick. Until then, the notion of becoming engaged to Lester had been kind of like a fantasy to her, an interesting story to share with her best girlfriends. Now it was out in the world, the property of others, not just Barbara Jean and the other Supremes. It was something real. Now it had the power to hurt people. She excused herself from the window table, brushing past Veronica and her friends on her way to Chick.
He was sitting on the corner of his bed when she walked into the storeroom. He wore his food-stained work apron and his hair was covered with a net. Before Barbara Jean could say anything, he spat out, “Were you going to tell me about it, or were you just going to invite me to the wedding?”
“I didn’t tell you about it because I knew you’d get upset. And there was really nothing to say. I didn’t tell Lester I was going to marry him.”
“What did you tell him, then?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
Chick stood up from the bed then and said, “Think about it? What’s there to think about?”
“There’s a whole lot to think about, Chick. There’s my life to think about. There’s my future to think about.” In the voice of her mother, Barbara Jean heard herself say, “I’ve got to be a forward-thinking woman. And a forward-thinking woman looks out for herself.”
Chick’s voice cracked as he spoke. His usual deep, smooth tone went high, almost childlike. “I thought you were going to let me look out for you. I thought you were going to be with me.”
“I can’t be with you, and you know it. We’ve been back here playing around and pretending like it could work out, but we both know it can’t.”
“We can get married. It’s been legal here for two years.”
“Legal’s one thing. What they’ll beat you down and string you up for is another.”
“Then we’ll get married and go someplace else. W
e’ve talked about it before. We could go to Chicago or Detroit. There are couples like us there and nobody even thinks a thing about it.”
“Haven’t you heard the news? The Promised Lands are on fire. If we tried walking down the street together in Chicago or Detroit, we wouldn’t make it half a block before our heads got busted open.”
He said, “I’ll figure out a way to make it work. There are plenty of other places we can go.”
“No, there aren’t, and you know it. The best we can hope for is to run away somewhere and find somebody like Big Earl who’d let us hole up in a little dump of a room like this.” She gestured around the storeroom. “And what about your brother? He’s been driving up and down the street for months now waiting for his chance to catch you outside alone just because you work for a black man. Now you want to tell him that you’re going to have a black wife? Do you honestly think he’d let you shame him by marrying me? You think he wouldn’t hunt you down and hurt you worse than he ever has? And wherever we go, we’d be lucky to get through a day without getting spit on. Chick, you don’t know what it’s like to have everybody look down on you, point at you, and treat you like you’re less than nothing. You think you know, but you don’t. I lived that way almost all my life until this last year and I can’t go back to it. I can’t.”
“What are you saying, Barbara Jean?”
She took a deep breath and tried to hold back the tears that wanted so badly to come out, and then she said what she had avoided saying all week. “I’m saying I’m going to marry Lester.”
Chick didn’t try to, or couldn’t, stop tears from flowing down his cheeks as he yelled, “You love me. I know you love me,” making it sound like an accusation.
She answered automatically and honestly without thinking. She said, “Yes. I love you.” Barbara Jean felt her will beginning to dissolve. She wanted to grab him and pull him into the bed with her with no thought of who might find them together. But then she felt the hand of her mother pushing her toward the door of the room just as surely as if Loretta had been alive and breathing. As Barbara Jean backed out of the storeroom, Loretta used her daughter’s mouth to say, “But love ain’t never put a bite of food on any table.”
The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat Page 20