“You mean you still read the Bible?” Cam had asked when they first became friends. “Even though no one makes you?”
“His word helps me,” Ada said, feeling self-conscious about her beliefs for the first time.
Cam softened her stance. “Well, whatever gets you through.”
Their different takes on faith cropped up from time to time, especially when Ada left Cam’s bed early on a Sunday to go to services. “It’s too hard to explain to someone who’s basically a heathen,” Ada had barked one morning early in their relationship, when she’d had her fill of Cam’s attempts to detain her.
Cam lashed out. “I have my own kind of faith! Sorry it’s not the simple-minded ‘Whatever you say, Jesus’ kind you Shooks subscribe to!”
Ada stormed out, slamming as many doors as she could. That first breakup lasted a week, until Cam apologized for calling Ada’s faith simple-minded. “But I need you to accept that I’m a believer in my own way. I have faith, too, just in different things. I have faith in you, for example. I have faith that people are good underneath. I have faith that Negroes and gay folks and all the other outsiders might be let in someday.”
It sounded pretty, but Ada didn’t cotton to alternative kinds of faith. And now, when all she had to get her through Auggie’s death was prayer, she was having a hard time even looking Cam in the eye.
“Maybe we should take a little break,” Ada suggested, her voice wavering as she tacked up pieces of a display on summer reading. “Maybe I shouldn’t move in just yet.”
“Why would you do that?” It wasn’t a demand so much as an entreaty.
“So I can get things straight in my mind,” Ada said. The thumbtacks didn’t go in as smoothly as she would have liked, and a few dropped from her shaking hand. Cam retrieved them and handed them back gently, and Ada noticed that she was close to tears. She had only seen Cam cry a couple of times—once, in sorrow, when her granny died, and once, in jubilation, when President Kennedy was inaugurated.
“What’s to get straight? We have a plan!” Cam said. “We’ve talked about this for almost two whole years, Ada Jane, we’ve fantasized about living together. I’m sick about Auggie, too, but I just don’t see why our plans have to change!” The use of her name instead of the usual darlin’ was jolting, unfamiliar; and Cam’s voice, so forceful and shrill, was the kind that invited attention. Ada glanced toward the library door window and thought she saw a figure darting away. Being found out was a fear that had taken up residence in the back of her mind.
“Because I have my doubts about the whole thing,” she replied. Then she turned back to her display, knowing she hadn’t been clear about what “the whole thing” was—the apartment? Their relationship? Being a gay girl? So the argument dangled like a worm on a hook until Cam finally turned and left.
§ § §
At supper, her mother filled up the silence, rambling on about the high price of beef, the words Clay Junior’s baby girl had learned that day, the new folks at church. Ada let her drone on, not even attempting to insert an observation or chuckle, the way she might when she wasn’t feeling down. She ate just enough so her mother would think she was watching her waistline, not being torn up inside.
Her father made swift work of his meal and left the table for a smoke on the back porch, while Ada’s mother glowered after him. “That man’s not said ten words at supper in a year. But you? The cat must have got your tongue.”
“Just a little tired, Mama. I’m sick.”
Sick was the code word her mother had devised for having her period, something she could say at home in front of her father or two brothers to avoid embarrassment.
Her mother tilted her head. “You been like this for almost a week. Being sick should be over by now.”
“It’s nothing to trouble yourself over.”
“You’re no trouble to me, Ada Jane. You can always talk to your mama.” But her lips were pressed together, as if she feared what the invitation for Ada to unload her worries might bring. Ada hesitated, considering how to break the situation into bits her mother could swallow.
“Mama, you know I was planning to be roommates with Cam Lively come the end of the school year.”
A pinched look crossed her mother’s face. “And I’ll repeat that I think that’s plain foolish. An unmarried girl, no matter how old, should be home with her folks.” Ada’s mother had married at seventeen, gliding easily from her parents’ home to her husband’s.
“I know what you think. But if I changed my mind . . . if I decided, say, I couldn’t afford it, or just didn’t want to right now . . .”
“This will always be your home,” her mother said a bit too eagerly, already humming a tune as she packed leftovers into the Frigidaire. She would likely come up with a new man for Ada to meet at church, a widower with thinning hair and a houseful of another woman’s kids.
§ § §
Ada came home from school late on a Thursday, and Twig’s Chevy pickup was parked in front of her house. “Thought you were still on the night shift,” she said through the open passenger window. Twig worked as a hospital orderly, but did not have his scrubs on, and an old duffle bag was secured in the truck’s open bed.
“I’m leaving, Ada,” he said. “Going to Atlanta for a change of scene. I got a cousin there who said I could crash on her couch.”
“You’re leaving now?”
“I thought you might have a drink with me first. One for the road, as they say.” He leaned over and popped the door for her.
She stepped up into the cab, casting a glance toward her parents’ bungalow. She thought she saw the curtain in the front room sway.
“My mama’s hopes will be up. She’ll think I finally nabbed myself a beau.”
Twig laughed so hard his head snapped back. “You’d have to be right desperate to take up with someone like me.” He liked to denigrate his looks, because he was tall and angular, with a chin and nose that looked like an amateur had sculpted them. But he’d had no trouble finding lovers, and he had started mentioning a man named Jimmy.
He drove her to The Hornet’s Nest, a bar in the basement of an old hotel in town. It wasn’t a homosexual club so much as a place where gay people gathered while the management turned a blind eye. Both women and men frequented it, and Cam had accompanied Auggie and Twig there many times, against Ada’s advice. The place seemed seedy, dangerous, with an entrance down a dark flight of stairs. “And what if you run into someone from school?” Ada had asked.
“I reckon they’ll be as scared to see me as I am to see them,” Cam replied.
Twig ordered a shot of whiskey for himself and a Coke for Ada, and he sat across the table from her, eyes focused on the door.
“You expecting trouble?” she asked.
“Always. Mind if I smoke?” He tapped his pack of Luckies on the table, and as if on cue, Cam appeared from behind them and pulled out the chair next to Ada’s.
“If I had known . . .” Ada said, the color rising from her neck until her ears felt like they were on fire.
“. . . you wouldn’t have come,” Twig finished.
“Are you even leaving town? Or was that a bald-faced lie?”
“I am for a fact, for a long weekend. Now if you ladies’ll excuse me, I should be hitting the road.” He downed his shot and was gone.
“Don’t be sore at Twig,” Cam said. “I asked him to trick you into coming, and he owed me one.”
“If I wanted to see you, I would have called,” Ada said.
“Darlin’, please, I’m dying here. I don’t know what it is we’re doing, what I did to make you not want to see me. All I know is I’m lost. It’s like somebody took my damn head off and screwed it back on the opposite way.”
Ada smiled in spite of herself, feeling something loosen inside her as Cam laid a hand on top of hers.
“Can you at least tell me what I did to hurt you? Hell, Ada Jane, I’d even go to church with you and ask forgiveness from God Almighty if it’d make t
hings right again.”
“I would almost believe you,” Ada said, “if you hadn’t said ‘hell’ in the same sentence as ‘God Almighty.’”
At the sting of her words, Cam removed her hand and laid it flat on the table with its mate. She shrugged. “You know that’s just me, darlin’.”
Ada examined the veins that roped across Cam’s hands, then let her eyes travel up to the muscles in her arms, so pronounced from playing sports for twenty years, ever since she was little—everything from softball to basketball to volleyball to golf. “The only balls I ever knew a damn thing about,” Cam liked to quip.
She finally met Cam’s eyes. She’d looked into those eyes first as a friend, later in times of passion. She’d studied the flecks of gold in the hazel until the pattern was as familiar as her own name. The fact was, although they would likely always fuss and fight, Cam’s were still the only eyes she wanted to look into every day.
She reached over and put her hand across Cam’s. “I have missed you,” she admitted. Then, so she wouldn’t appear to be surrendering too much too easily, she added, “Sunday service is at eleven.”
Trouble
1970
It turned out there was no bomb, but the scare was bad enough. Ada had been leading a class of seventh-graders in a lesson about the school library’s resources when the fire alarm sounded, a string of unrelenting staccato beeps.
The librarian knew very well it wasn’t a drill. The paper had reported that in the first week of classes, nine public high schools across Charlotte closed for bomb threats, although no actual explosives turned up. White and black parents alike were vexed by the judicial busing order. “My child is simply not riding a bus for an hour,” one angry white mother told the reporter.
Ada’s twenty students remained oblivious, ecstatic that class was cut short. They laughed and tripped over each other on their way out to the parking lot. “Quickly now, children,” she instructed as she tried to shape them back into an orderly line. “Let’s go!” Her voice was more urgent than she intended, but they were taking their sweet time, and what if this threat was real?
“Well, isn’t this a fine how-de-do,” Cam whispered as they stood side by side in the parking lot with their students. “I told you the crazies wouldn’t just target high schools.”
The parking lot was the farthest point from the school building. Three or four car lengths away from them, standing with his eighth-grade class, was Robert Browne, the new history teacher and the junior high’s first full-time black faculty member.
“I wonder how Mr. Browne feels,” she whispered back.
“Same as us, I expect,” Cam replied. “Damned embarrassed to live in this city. I can’t help thinking back to those bombings five years ago. You remember? When they blew up the civil rights workers’ homes?”
Mr. Browne was the replacement for a white history teacher who had retired abruptly rather than work in a school that admitted more than just a few token blacks. Several others had followed that teacher’s lead. The number of white students had diminished, too, with dozens of parents withdrawing their children and enrolling them in segregated private academies.
The new teacher was younger than both Ada and Cam, no more than thirty, and wore his hair in a close-cropped Afro. Unlike Mrs. Prescott, the part-time music teacher who could almost pass for white, his skin was dark as coffee. He seemed to have one good gray suit that he freshened every day with a crisp striped shirt and pocket handkerchief. No matter how sweltering the day, his suit jacket stayed on. Ada recognized him as a fellow introvert, somebody who kept his distance out of habit, but maybe he was more outgoing among his own folks.
“Mr. Browne has a sterling academic background, top of his class at Johnson C. Smith,” Principal Riordan announced during in-service day. The principal had never praised the credentials of any other new teacher, as far as Ada could recall, and Mr. Browne looked embarrassed. “I hope you all will join me in welcoming him to the Central family.” The staff offered a round of applause, but later Ada overheard some ugly talk. (“He’s so . . . black,” one teacher commented. “Like a field hand,” another agreed.)
“He’s a good-looking man,” Ada noted while the faculty and students waited in the parking lot for further instructions.
“Can’t say I noticed,” Cam replied. Then, with a grin: “You switching teams on me, darlin’?”
When the police arrived with their dogs, even the youngest of the students sensed the danger. The parking lot became a sea of fidgeting bodies, with some students crying like elementary school children.
“Everything’s fine,” Ada said to reassure her class. But then Principal Riordan’s voice came over a bullhorn: “Due to unforeseen circumstances,” he said, “we are ending classes early today.”
§ § §
All month, Central endured bomb scares that amounted to nothing, but still, the threat of trouble fell like gauze over the start of the school year. Teachers were less companionable, rushing to classes and then home directly after, instead of tarrying to socialize in the lounge. Students seemed fussier, especially in the cafeteria, where petty skirmishes erupted. Principal Riordan now had a full cohort overseeing lunch, two faculty members and an assistant principal.
Ada was paired with Jeanette Hutchins, the new P.E. teacher she and Cam had both wondered about—“You think she’s one of us?” they’d asked each other—but who sported a gaudy diamond on her left hand. Miss Hutchins liked to insert some tidbit about “my fiancé, Tom,” into conversation whenever she could. “The butch lady doth protest too much,” Cam liked to say. Still, she was a compatriot in politics, if nothing else. “I just don’t see what the fuss is about,” Miss Hutchins said of the changed makeup of the student body. “They’re children, for goodness sake.”
Cam’s partner on lunch duty was Mr. Browne, and she expressed an eagerness to get to know him better, even under tense circumstances. If anyone could get a shy person talking, she could, her ease with conversation having first drawn Ada to her. In just a few lunch periods, Cam learned that Mr. Browne had been arrested in a Charlotte lunch counter sit-in in 1960 and had taken part in the Freedom Rides a year later as a card-carrying member of SNCC.
“He helped make history!” was the way Cam put it, delight spreading across her face. She had a progressive streak a few miles long, especially when it came to civil rights. They weren’t so far apart in their beliefs, but Cam took her actions further than Ada was willing. “Isn’t that a Negro event?” Ada had asked when Cam expressed interest in going to the March on Washington in ’63.
“It’s for everyone, Ada Jane,” Cam snapped. In the end, Cam had traveled without her, on a bus chartered by a local Presbyterian church. “It was a once in a lifetime event,” she said on her return, “and you missed it.”
“Next time,” Ada replied.
Now, it seemed, there was always something more to report on Cam’s growing friendship with Mr. Browne, who had glided into being “Robert.” “I invited Robert to lunch at Anderson’s,” Cam said after supper one evening when they were reading across from each other in the living room. Ada was absorbed in Slaughterhouse-Five, while Cam was finishing up The Death of the President. The announcement came out of the blue. “This Saturday.”
Ada felt a pinch of jealousy. She liked Anderson’s, a popular restaurant not far from school frequented by Central teachers and staff. Why hadn’t Cam invited her? Saturdays were a golden time when they slept in late and then went to movies, or held at-homes with their gay friends.
“You could invite him here instead,” Ada suggested. “I have a ham.”
Cam’s book closed with a soft slap. Her hands busied themselves smoothing the cellophane that covered the library book.
“That’s not a good idea, darlin’.”
“After all these years I think we know how to be discreet.”
“I didn’t mean that.” Cam put the book on the end table and hunched forward in her chair. “I meant, you don’t
see any blacks in this neighborhood. Except for Pinky.” The gray-haired handyman came Monday afternoons to mop the floors of their apartment building and drag the trashcans to the curb. Even though Ada asked him to call her by her Christian name, Pinky steadfastly added the “Miss” in front of it.
“With all the trouble that’s going on in the city, it’d be even less welcoming around these parts for Robert.”
“Yes, of course,” Ada agreed, embarrassed that she had only considered her own feelings, not Mr. Browne’s.
She waited to be asked to Anderson’s, too, but instead Cam cracked her book open again. It was only when she had put it aside to get ready for bed that Cam added, “You could come along. To lunch, I mean. Unless . . .” Her voice trailed off, and Ada knew the invitation was insincere.
“No, you go,” Ada said, struggling to soften the sharp edge of her voice.
Later, Cam brought home a piece of pecan pie for Ada and didn’t have anything special to note about the lunch date. “It was fine,” she said. “I told Robert we’re roommates, and he said to tell you hey.” But she was all animated energy until supper, suggesting to Ada that fine had been an understatement.
§ § §
On a quiet morning when there’d been no bomb threats or fights in the cafeteria for at least a week, Robert Browne came to the library and cleared his throat until Ada took notice.
“Mr. Browne,” she said. “How can I help you?”
“Robert,” he corrected her. “I want to order some books. For the library.” He placed a loose-leaf sheet in front of her. “I checked the card catalog and didn’t find any of them.” She scanned his handwritten list, which included titles by W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and James Baldwin. The library had no titles by black authors save a
dog-eared copy of A Raisin in the Sun, which Cam taught in eighth-grade English.
The Ada Decades Page 8