Paper Gods

by Goldie Taylor

  Hampton had gone to the sprawling church, City of Faith Christian Ministries, the previous Sunday morning and listened to a decidedly less controversial but markedly political sermon. There was less talk about purifying fires and more about the stewardship of voting, as if it were an eleventh commandment.

  Hampton scribbled down a few notes, capturing the sights and sounds, as he listened to the magnificent choir sing and watched the collection plates circle the luxurious sanctuary. He wondered how many of the congregants actually lived inside the Fifteenth District, when the church itself stood to the south of the legislative line and squarely in the Thirteenth. The Fifteenth, a straight shot across the City of Atlanta and Fulton County, lay to the west side of the Fifth, represented by Rep. John Lewis, and to the north and east of the Thirteenth, which was helmed by Rep. David Scott.

  State Representative Sarah Cohn-Mitchell was said to be rounding up support. Mitchell, a divorcée who still lived like a housewife, was a real surprise. A fiscal conservative and social liberal hailing from Neighborhood Planning Unit A, Mitchell was the ex-wife of Leland “Lucky” Mitchell, minion of one Virgil Loudermilk. That was one complication that Hampton had not predicted.

  Hampton ran out of fingers and toes counting up the potential candidates. Mitchell, who talked faster than a midnight drag race up Buford Highway, was probably running out of sheer boredom, he figured. She had too much money and too much time on her hands, but she knew her way around a good piece of legislation.

  Goodwin, the megachurch pastor who bathed himself in the blood of Jesus, was a political neophyte. He had never declared his party allegiance before, though word had it that he would run as a Democrat and Virgil Loudermilk was pulling the strings. Hampton wondered why Loudermilk had jumped ship in a race that would be like sledding uphill in a mud storm. But that was a question for another day, Hampton thought to himself.

  Hampton filed an eleven-hundred-word story about Goodwin’s rumored political ambitions, complete with both on-the-record and anonymous sources. It was set to go live the following morning.

  He scanned the ballroom for other missing faces. City council president Keyes Jordan was notably absent. Jordan was a member of Goodwin’s church, and the street chatter had it that he, too, was a closet Republican who ran as an independent to keep his nonpartisan seat. Sadie Brooks-Newkirk, the newly elected chairman of the Fulton County Commission, was also missing, as was H. Milsap Stallworth, the president of the 100 Black Men of Atlanta. Stallworth’s absence was odd, given that he never missed a moment in the spotlight. Where one or more television cameras were assembled, one could count on finding Stallworth in the midst.

  Perhaps more curious, there was still no sign of Chip Dobbs. The mayor’s brother was a political liability, so it wasn’t surprising that Dobbs had put him out to pasture. According to the morning headlines, Richard Lester was out on a five-million-dollar cash bond, under house arrest with a court-issued ankle bracelet, and awaiting trial. Chip hadn’t been charged, though Hampton figured it was only a matter of time before he cut a sweet deal—if he hadn’t already. There were three unnamed informants listed in the Lester indictment.

  Hampton watched with intensity now, as Mayor Dobbs traded hugs and air-blown kisses with volunteers and shook hands with a scrum of preachers and assorted business leaders. The ballroom was packed, but even now she had a way of making you feel like she knew you personally and that your deepest troubles were her own. There was real substance under her pretty words, Hampton admitted to himself.

  There was big, little, and no money in the room, more than enough to carry an election, by Hampton’s estimation. The script would be easy, Hampton surmised. A couple of perfunctory lines about her mentor, Ezra Hawkins, and maybe a few strategically placed tears as she memorialized her decades-dead father.

  bThe entourage continued making its way through the masses. Music filled the air as they hoisted their daughters onto the stage. The mayor’s twin daughters, named in honor of Mahalia Jackson and Maya Angelou, wore matching blue taffeta dresses with marvelously large bows cinched at the waist. They were the spitting image of their mother. Their silk-pressed hair flowed down their backs like cascading waterfalls.

  Here I am, baby!

  Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours!

  The Dobbs-Overstreet family was a beautiful lot, postcard perfect. Hampton couldn’t help thinking that the mayor looked a lot like a movie star as she strode onto the stage, waving like Miss America. She was surrounded by assorted business leaders, selected clergy, and other high-profile supporters squeezed in shoulder to shoulder behind them—a coalition of the willing and powerful, all eager to be caught in the camera shot. Congressmen John Lewis and Hank Johnson were among the chosen few who stepped onto the podium. He spotted David Scott too. Dobbs was stacking the deck.

  Pastor Benjamin Melham took to the microphone again. Hampton checked his recorder for a second time. Littering his introduction with praises to the Almighty, the preacher let his voice boom over the audience. Then came Congressman Lewis, his trademark southern drawl and peculiar inflections still prevalent years after the civil rights movement, when he had been kicked in the head by a horse during a protest.

  “She did not come to be served, but to serve!” Lewis exclaimed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you the next congresswoman from the Fifteenth Congressional District. My sister, my leader, my friend—”

  BOOM!

  Lewis flinched. Hampton reflexively covered his head as the floor rattled beneath him. The lights flickered and the crowd flooded toward the exit doors, clambering to get out.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  The building shook. A team of security guards ushered the mayor, her family, and all three congressmen from the stage and guided them out a side door just as the lights went out. Hampton heard crying and shouting in the darkness. Emergency lamps kicked in, dimly relighting the room. Hampton could see burly security guards pushing people out the bank of doors. He released the hand brake on his chair and gripped his wheels.

  For all his grumbling about the APD, Hampton was relieved when a uniformed officer grabbed the handles of his wheelchair and pushed him into the crowded hallway. The escalators had been shut down.

  “Any idea what’s going on?”

  “Fire in the parking deck,” the officer said. “The elevators are out. We’ll take the stairs.”

  “Seriously? Anybody hurt?”

  “That I don’t know, sir.”

  The officer flagged down a second, and together they carried Hampton up three flights, in his chair, and into the atrium-capped lobby. He could smell the putrid smoke now. The fire alarms screeched. A firefighter shouted orders over a bullhorn.

  Outside, Peachtree Street was already lined with frightened hotel guests, employees, and nosy tourists. First-responder vehicles came from every direction. Plumes of thick gray smoke billowed from the front valet drive, which descended into the underground deck. Hampton caught sight of a slender boy blowing by on a skateboard.

  Babyboy404?

  They locked eyes briefly as the teenager paused, then hiked up his jeans and zoomed away. Hampton noted his dreadlocks tied back in a knot, his narrow jaw and cocoa-brown skin.

  Babyboy404?

  Hampton felt an urge to give chase, though he was immediately glad he couldn’t afford to pay for hotel parking and had left his minivan in a metered spot, a block over on Portman Boulevard. The story was already writing and rewriting itself in his head as he arrived at a Starbucks near the corner of Seventh and Peachtree.

  NINETEEN

  Rosetta was telling her son all about the ladies over at Starr’s Beauty Palace, and how she suspected Mrs. Lorna Boone was cheating at bid whist, when an orderly walked in. He greeted her respectfully, as if she were a head of state, and placed a clear plastic bag on the nightstand. Chip was still unconscious, but Rosetta was sure that he could feel her presence.

  As he drew closer, Rosetta realized she found the hospital att
endant oddly familiar. There were sprigs of gray along his temples and he had soft yet serious eyes.

  “Mama Dobbs, you don’t remember me, but I ran track and played football with Chip at Mays. We’re all pulling for him,” the white-clothed orderly said. “I’m going to the prayer vigil at Elizabeth Baptist, if I can get off work early.”

  She hesitated, then asked, “What’s your name, son?”

  “Roger, ma’am. Roger Thompson. They used to call me Skeeter in school. Still do.”

  “Well, praise Jesus. You’re Willie Thompson’s boy, right? I see it now. You talk like him too.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How long have you been working down here?”

  “Going on twelve years now.”

  “Pray for my son, will you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I will,” Roger said. “And we’re praying for Vicki too. She’s come a long way since we graduated from high school. I knew she’d make good.”

  “Indeed. I hope you will vote in the special election.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I remember when I cast my first vote for mayor. Maynard Jackson. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

  “I imagine they don’t,” Rosetta said.

  “He made this city. White folks ain’t like it none, but Maynard was our man.”

  “Indeed, he was.”

  “Sam Massell fired a thousand garbage workers after a thirty-seven-day union strike. Maynard stood shoulder to shoulder with men like my father, and they helped him take the mayor’s office.”

  “You know your history, son. Too many have forgotten.”

  “Now this city is changing. All those people moving into all those big high-rises,” Skeeter lamented. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, white people.”

  “Speak your heart, son.”

  “Westside don’t even look the same. Fancy restaurants and condos, full of happy white folk. I got on a MARTA train last week to get down to my part-time gig at the airport and I was the only black face on there. They buying up the whole Westside too. Cain’t even get a studio apartment off Northside Drive with a whole month’s pay nowadays. Ain’t that something?”

  “That’s a shame,” Rosetta said. “Folks oughta be able to afford to live in the city if nowhere else.”

  “Vicki is on our side. She’s one of us too. My mama packed up and moved out to Villa Rica five years ago. Sold her house on Oglethorpe Avenue over by West End Mall. The buyer was some real estate development company out of Germany. They paid cash.”

  “Sure enough?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Skeeter replied. “They say if it keeps going on like this, with everybody moving up and out, the next mayor will be white too. I’ont mind that, but I cain’t even get tickets to a Falcons game, and the Braves moved to Cobb County. They blew up Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium and built a new ballpark, but we never got the development they promised, and now that’s gone too. My daddy’s sister got a nice check to move off the Hill, but she’s staying with my mama now because the money ran out. Hurts my heart.”

  “She ain’t by herself. Too many families can tell the same story.”

  The Atlanta Way.

  Rosetta was thinking now about the Grand Bargain, about the deal cut between black political power brokers and wealthy white business leaders. Dating back to the early ’70s, and further if she admitted it to herself, the unwritten treaty assured black leadership in a majority-black city, even if they didn’t hold the purse strings. The biracial partnership kept the city on a solid business footing, winning an Olympic bid and a torrent of economic development over nearly a half century. It spelled the difference between St. Louis, Cleveland, or Chicago—deeply segregated cities where black people living in decimated neighborhoods wielded little in the way of political power. For decades, Atlanta had fought to maintain the balance of race and class, of wealth and poverty, but people living on the margins mostly lost out.

  Even Skeeter, a nine-dollar-an-hour orderly at a public hospital, knew the math. And Rosetta knew it too. Her late husband, the Reverend Dr. Park Dobbs, had been an early proponent, an architect of the political landscape on which their daughter now stood. The fight had been hard, blood had been let, but a new generation of beneficiaries—black and white alike—knew little of that legacy. The lone hope lay with her daughter, Rosetta lamented, not to turn back the clock but to right the road ahead. She prayed that her husband’s dream would be enough to stave off the winter she knew to be coming, that Victoria would continue to embrace that hope.

  “She’s one of us,” Skeeter said again.

  “Indeed,” Rosetta replied, deep with measured regret.

  “I won’t keep you. I’m praying for Chip,” he said.

  What was left of her youngest child’s charred suit lay inside the bag. Rosetta rose from her chair and took hold of it. Skeeter disappeared down the hall.

  The Marcus Trauma Center at Grady Memorial, named for Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, has fifteen beds, including seven dedicated to resuscitation. Chip had arrived by ambulance with complex solid organ injuries, including a perforated kidney and liver. The left side of his skull was crushed, and if he survived, they said he would need reconstructive surgery.

  The facility, situated along the downtown connector on Jesse Hill Drive, was less than a mile from the downtown Hyatt, a brisk walk across Woodruff Park and through the Georgia State University campus on a pleasant day.

  Victoria found Rosetta there, in a heavily guarded room in the “red” section of the trauma center, still clutching the plastic bag of clothing.

  “Mama?”

  “They say he might not ever be the same.”

  “None of us will come out of this the same.”

  The breathing machine hummed and a heart monitor let out pulses in the oddly odorless room. Victoria could see a patrol officer’s heavy leather shoes under the separation curtain, which gave her slight relief. She was satisfied that Grady Hospital security knew how to handle high-profile patients, and there were dozens of APD officers stationed in and outside the hospital. Even so, there were plans to move him once he’d been stabilized and placed under federal protection.

  The regional ATF director and Agent Clearwater from the GBI briefed her that afternoon. An explosive device was rigged to Chip’s remote key fob. Chip was four parking spaces away when the police sergeant sent to retrieve him called his name. He heard his name and spun around, but not before clicking the keyless entry button.

  Click, click. BOOM!

  Chip unwittingly detonated the switch tied to the wireless locking system, and the matte-black Porsche 911 exploded. The force of the first blast knocked him forward, rendering him unconscious as his head planted against a concrete pylon. A second and third car caught fire, igniting the gas tanks, kicking off another round of blasts.

  The sergeant, badly burned himself, radioed for help as he dragged Chip by his armpits into the glass-fronted motor lobby. Within the hour, the fires were contained and ATF agents sealed the deck and two floors that housed conference rooms above it. Guests were rebooked at surrounding hotels, leaving the Hyatt dark and empty for the first time since it was built in 1967.

  “We seized ninety-six hours of surveillance footage, and every parking attendant has been questioned,” Clearwater explained. “We ran every license plate through the state DMV. We’re interviewing the owners, one by one.”

  As the joint task force waded through reams of evidence, Chip clung to life with burns to over two-thirds of his body. It took three surgeries to repair his liver and kidney. His face was fully wrapped in gauze, leaving openings for his eyes and the tracheal tube. A central line was attached to his chest.

  If only I hadn’t made him leave in the first place. If only I had not …

  Victoria struggled through the blame, reliving the horrible fight with the brother she loved. He’d been right about a lot of things last night. How she regarded herself as above it all, though still desperate for public approval, even deny
ing her husband the respect of taking his name.

  Now sitting with Rosetta, cupping her veiny brown hands in her own, Victoria remembered how she’d spent her whole life protecting her brother and now thought God seemed to have been protecting him from her.

  “This is my fault, Mama. I let this happen.”

  “Enough with that. I won’t let you sit up here and talk like that,” Rosetta protested. “I heard about that foolishness up in that hotel room.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  “No need in that. No right or wrong as far as I can see. You two have been at it since the day your father and I brought him home from the hospital. You bucked and hollered more than he did.”

  “Did I really?”

  “You didn’t even like me holding him. You wouldn’t let me nurse the boy in peace.”

  Victoria allowed herself a pained smile. She spotted a wrinkled envelope, singed at the edges, on a tray table next to a sweating cup of ice.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “It was in his suit coat pocket,” Rosetta said. “There’s a fancy piece of construction paper in there, shaped up like a bird or whatnot. I think little Chippy might’ve made it. You remember that boy Skeeter Thompson from school? He brought it in here with your brother’s clothes.”

  Victoria went numb. Her legs stiffened.

  “What is it, dear? Are you alright?”

  She shook her head and said, “Yes, Mama. I’m fine. And I remember Skeeter. I got him a job down here back when I cochaired the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority.”

  Victoria grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a box on the counter and carefully opened the envelope. Suddenly there was a knot in her throat, and she could not breathe. Her thoughts drifted back to Ebenezer, the Sunday morning when Ezra Hawkins was killed. Gunshots echoed in her head like a cascade of fireworks. Her mother’s voice began to roll in the background and echoed through the haze as though it were coming from the other side of a mountain. It looked like a bird, maybe a dragon, just like the one she’d found in the congressman’s Bible. The origami was a message of some kind, she knew. One she did not understand. Victoria now felt like there was a target on her own back.