She had endured the grade school teasing in her old neighborhood, where her schoolmates crafted urban mythology about every po’ man, a character who, as punishment for unknown family transgressions, was destined to eat children but could gain little life-sustaining weight from them. It was an effective torture that linked her to the social outcasts of the neighborhood. To them, Every Mann was just a younger embodiment of the drunkards and homeless who held on to their vices in lieu of family. Just as po’ as no-man’s-land, they taunted. Someone had discarded Every, and her peers didn’t need to know who or why.
Back then, Every had spent most of her recess time tucked into a book, but on occasion she’d be drawn to a crowd by the contagious excitement of children gathered around the inappropriate, mischievous, or unexplainable. Such was the case that drew her eyes from the adventures of Heidi and to a circle of classmates. Every walked around them until she found a space to squeeze between two larger seventh graders. At first, all she could see was a pool of water in the middle of the playground, and like her classmates, she was in awe of its size. It seemed a lake had grown on the gravel. Within it, an ecosystem developed where hundreds of worms writhed. Her thoughts joined the murmur of questions in the crowded hive. How many were in there? And slowly, someone’s attention turned to whether it was enough to feed every po’ man. Every felt two hands ram into her back and then she pitched forward into the playground lake of worms.
Her fierce shrieks and the rapid approach of teachers scattered the crowd except for Nelle, who reached down and pulled Every out of the mire and protectively wrapped her arms around her.
Once the tears stopped, the silence began. Every didn’t speak to anyone for a week. She couldn’t process how anyone could do something so vile, and it short-circuited her thoughts of everything else. At the end of a week, she let go to Nelle, who had been her constant companion during the time. “I can’t help not having parents. I don’t know what awful thing they did that they’re not here.”
Nelle nodded. “Maybe they didn’t do anything awful. Maybe sending you here was something good . . . like heroic.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” Nelle thought carefully. “Didn’t baby Moses’ mother send him away? And then he ended up being raised by Pharaoh’s daughter and saving a whole bunch of folk from slavery!”
Every smiled and then frowned.
“What?” Nelle asked concerned. “You can’t see you as a leader of our people?”
“I can’t see Mama Ann as a daughter of Pharaoh!” Every chortled.
Eve didn’t know the origins of Every and detached from it quite successfully, manipulating clerks at her new high school to lose the “ry” in this record or that document, assuring them that it was one clerical error gone haywire. And who could doubt such a story? Who would ever name a child Every? Every Mann at that.
Her name adaptation was trivial compared to the changes of the time. Chemically straightened hair was slowly being abandoned. Skirt hemlines were creeping higher. Surnames were replaced with Xs to break identification with ancestral slave names. Eve stepped further away from the skinny, thick-haired girl who cringed at her name whenever she sat in the straight-backed kitchen chair in front of the stove.
When Eve stopped questioning her aunt, Ann was grateful for the respite. All she wanted to do was raise her sister’s child to be an upstanding, God-fearing woman who would not repeat the mistakes of her mother. Ann was afraid of her niece’s curiosity. When you shut the door to keep Satan out, you don’t crack it open for a few questions. The only thing her niece needed to know was that her mother, Ann’s sister, had died in childbirth and that she was her legal guardian. But the truth was that Ann didn’t know how to process the image of her sister bleeding out on a hospital table and blabbering seemingly incoherent phrases. Nor did she know that her sister, Mercy, looking up at those white faces in their surgical masks, died praying not for herself, or for her child, but whispering in her final utterance that every man is a child of God. Ann could not communicate these things, and so she took relief in the absence of her niece’s inquiries.
Yet the questions hadn’t disappeared from Eve’s mind. They remained never too far from the surface, sharing space with adolescent thoughts of who could dance the best Watusi and who would be the first to buy the new Temptations album. Eve’s adolescence ended amid an increase in cultural tension throughout the city.
A few months after they moved into their home, Malcolm X was killed. It was widely speculated that the Nation of Islam, from which he had recently been excommunicated, had arranged his murder. As the community mourned, the Muhammads in the twenty-six homes gave way to Johnsons, Williamses, and Washingtons. By the time King was assassinated three years later, nonviolent movements went the way of shirtwaist dresses and straightened hair.
Eve felt even more lost in the melee, as her personal woes seemed part and parcel of a myriad of community sacrifices. Her mourning of those dead long ago was supplanted by that of recent martyrs, and her thoughts turned from finding herself in family to finding herself in the conflagration of society. When the news cycle rotated through the assassinations to the controversial renaming of one of the city colleges after Malcolm X, Eve’s longing for connection and desire for knowledge coalesced into an idea.
two
in search of beginnings
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
It was 1972 in Chicago. Some remember it for bringing the worst commuter rail crash in the city’s history when the Illinois Central Gulf train overshot the Twenty-Seventh Street Station and received the clearance to back up just as the heavier 720 Express was huffing and puffing its way at full speed on the same track. Forty people were killed and over three hundred injured.
That same year in the Windy City—as at least two thousand audience members can attest—Jesse Jackson, sporting a large afro, corduroy trousers, leather vest, and Martin Luther King medallion entreated them in call-and-response fashion with the mantra “I am . . . somebody.” Even the dope fiends, the poor, and the uneducated were not exempt from this proclamation.
For Eve Mann, whose nascent political awareness began to blossom just as organizations like the Black Panther Party dwindled, 1972 Chicago placed her in a Black studies class at Malcolm X Junior College, eager to learn the intellectual side of the social struggles that dominated her South Side existence from the outskirts of her community. If she could not answer the question of who she was, then perhaps she could decide who she would become. On the first day of class, she trained her eyes and focused on the professor.
He introduced himself as Brother LeRoi—not lee-roy, as many in the class were accustomed to hearing the name, but luh-roy. For some reason it sounded more intellectual that way, and this Brother LeRoi, by virtue of a shift in spelling and stress, was distanced from the Leroys that they knew.
“Who are you?” His voice rumbled and encompassed the class with the query. “Who am I?” he continued. “Who are we?” Standing just over six feet tall, with the light from the overhead fluorescent bulbs reflecting off his clean-shaven scalp, Brother LeRoi commanded attention, and the students at once ceased their knapsack fumbling, nail picking, and first-day chattering. The class was silent save for the occasional creak of chairs—unfortunate holdovers from years past.
The students were mostly young Black men and women—some too scared to leave the comforts of home and go away to a four-year college. A few had grown up with southern parents who had terrified them with stories of the South and continued to seek refuge in what was still thought of as a land of greater opportunity. Several, like Eve, had actually struck out on their own as prodigal children only to return to their homes, products of having too much of something or not enough of something else. These were the older ones in the class. Ranging from early to midtwenties, they had acquired just enough
maturity to prompt skepticism of Brother LeRoi and silently question whether his dashiki was real, as in really from Africa, or one of the Taiwanese knockoffs sold out of the trunks of T-Birds on Forty-Seventh Street. Some were taken aback by the contrast of his light skin against clothing that had been long associated with Blackness. But they all were mesmerized by the voice that reached out to them, beckoning and promising, beseeching and bequeathing connection to a shared legacy. They were a generation that turned toward Pan-Africanism, while previous ones had shunned it. Brother LeRoi could deliver Africa, a vision that bestowed value on their West Side, South Side, Cabrini Green, Ida B. Wells housing project existence. They wanted to know the origins of their rhythms. They wanted to know whose children they were before they were the children of slaves.
Her seat in the last row, close to the exit, afforded her a view of the backs of several afros of varying heights, two bobs, a press-and-curl like her own, and one long blond—no straightening agents needed. Brown eyes of various shades periodically grazed over the drop of buttermilk spilled among flies. Pale legs flowed from a gold miniskirt and landed in matching platform shoes. A macramé bag with a “Chisholm for President” button rested against them.
Watching her, Eve absently raked fingers through her own pressed hair. Her hands came away slick with the remnants of Ultra Sheen, that aqua-blue-tinged grease that promised to lubricate Black hair into submission when slathered onto carefully parted scalps. Her one foray into the afro resulted in neighborhood boys calling her cotton swab. Eve rubbed her greasy fingers on the ends of her hair, which always seemed to dry out quicker than her roots, being so far from the Ultra Sheen’s initial point of contact.
Brother LeRoi rumbled on about cultural identity as he dropped mimeographed papers onto their desks. They were hot off the press and immediately smudged black ink on fingertips. Eve’s attention returned at the lure of the freshly deposited syllabus and reading list. She was reaching for the syllabus when Brother LeRoi cleared his throat and adjusted the black-rimmed glasses that rested on the bridge of his nose. “But let’s not get too far into things. Back to my first question . . . Who are you? Not as a people. Not yet, anyway. Who are you as an individual person? Who are your people as you know them? Mother? Father . . . ?”
Afros nodded in agreement, blond hair swung, and a quiet but distinct “Right on” acknowledged that he had their attention. Brother LeRoi dabbed away a trickle of sweat that ran from under his kufi with a crisp handkerchief, a mannerism familiar to those who had attended the evangelical or Baptist or revivalist services from various churches—sans kufi, of course. It subconsciously signaled the impending crescendo in a sermon, song, or speech. And they responded in kind with “Right on” in lieu of “Amen.” Like her classmates, Eve was entranced as Brother LeRoi rattled off bits and pieces about Black genealogy and uncovered (as noted on the syllabus) “the unknown neg(he)ros before discovering the African kings and queens to which we all claim relation.”
Brother LeRoi slowly exhaled the decreasing cadence of his lecture, “Before we get into all this theory, let’s start with a little genealogy project of our own.” He explained that they would be tracing their own genealogies by gathering information from their relatives and collecting family pictures, legal documents, and obituaries.
“Careful though,” Brother LeRoi warned. “Obits don’t always contain accurate information. They share only the information that the relative providing it wants the public to know.”
Eve’s excitement quickly dissipated with the realization that she would be unable to complete the first assignment—or any, if they involved speaking with family members. In her case, it was family member—singular. Her attention waned, and she hung her head like a church parishioner when the collection plate circulates and lost herself in memories of the last time she was in a classroom and her failed matriculation at Tuskegee Institute.
She’d been so happy to get her acceptance letter from Tuskegee and had mistakenly thought her aunt would share in her enthusiasm. It was Mama Ann, after all, who had demanded that she be forward thinking. Eve could still recall their argument clearly after three years.
Eve and her best friend Nelle sat, shoulders touching, on her bed, staring at the envelope. Nelle had received her acceptance letter days earlier.
“I’m too nervous to open it.” Eve shivered and handed the envelope to Nelle.
Nelle held her palm up in refusal, “Nawl, sista. College is finally being grown, and that’s gotta start now. I’m here for you no matter what that letter say.”
Eve inhaled deeply and slowly turned the letter over to unseal it.
“What y’all doing?” Ann bellowed from the doorway, startling them both.
“Shh, Mama Ann!” Eve clutched her dashiki-clad chest. “I’m trying to see if I got into Tuskegee.”
“Well, what I got to shush for? How’s my talkin’ gonna change what’s in that letter?”
Nelle gave a pleading look to Ann, who acquiesced but remained in the doorway. The brief silent respite was broken by Eve’s shrieks. “I got in! I got in!” she leapt from the bed and embraced Nelle. Turning toward her aunt, she was met by Ann’s swiftly departing backside.
Nelle slung an arm around her friend’s slumped shoulders. “Take some time to enjoy the moment.”
“It’s already over.” Eve’s enthusiasm departed. “I may as well get this talk over with now.”
Nelle turned Eve to face her and grabbed her hands. “We are going to Tuskegee, sis. It’s all we’ve talked about through high school.”
Eve nodded. “I know.”
“Then I’ll let you get to it.” Nelle grabbed her jacket off Eve’s bed and exited, leaving her friend to the inevitable argument.
Ann derided Eve for her dashiki and railed about “backward Black youth who don’t know why their parents left in the first place.”
Eve countered with “guardians not sharing information being the reason why so many young Black folk are returning to the South to retrieve it.”
In the end, Eve reminded her aunt, “You left home, Mama Ann! Nobody stopped you.”
“Yes!” Ann shouted back.
“You came here!” Eve matched Ann’s volume. Their shrill voices vibrated against the walls.
“I came here to take care of you, Every! It wasn’t a choice!”
Eve sighed and held up the acceptance letter. “Well, this is, and I’m going.”
Eve was whisked out of her memory by a blue jean bell-bottom whipping past her ankle. Class was dismissing, and she scrambled to gather her things so as not to be left behind.
Brother LeRoi spotted her and smiled, misinterpreting her lingering. “Did you want to speak to me about the project?”
Eve shifted uncomfortably in the chair-desk combo and for a fleeting moment felt herself relapse into her childhood as Every Mann—po’, skinny, motherless urchin.
Brother LeRoi’s eyes shone brightly behind his glasses. A smattering of freckles adorned his cheekbones. He waited as Eve silently debated with herself. She hadn’t enrolled in the class just to give up on the first day. She had known it would place her face-to-face with the gaps in her family history. In fact, she had counted on it, although she hadn’t realized it would occur so soon. Eve struggled to form the words that would open one of her deepest internal conflicts to this stranger. She wanted to share but not overshare. Not that she had enough information to constitute oversharing.
“Well, Mr. LeRoi . . .”
“Please, Brother LeRoi,” he interjected.
“Ah, right. Brother LeRoi, I’m not sure how successful I’ll be with this first assignment. My—” Eve stopped short as she caught sight of movement from the door, a flash of blond hair and the macramé bag she had admired earlier. Brother LeRoi followed her gaze and cleared his throat.
His eyes returned to Eve, but his tone was clipped, impatient. “Look, sist
a . . . um?”
“Eve.” She stood, compelled by his sudden urgency yet not fully understanding its motivation.
He smiled. “Sister Eve—biblical first woman; I like that. See me during office hours tomorrow. It’s on the syllabus. I’m sure we can work through whatever hesitations or problems you’re having with the assignment.” Brother LeRoi’s eyes darted quickly toward the exit; still, he waited with raised eyebrow until Eve smiled and agreed. He then covered the distance from Eve’s seat to the exit in a few long strides. As Eve packed her bag, she glimpsed the simultaneous departure of gold platform shoes and the macramé bag.
The Milwaukee Service transfer to Jackson Park train shuttled Eve through the city’s racial landscape as passengers progressively darkened the farther south it traveled. Dark skin dominated the train cars after passing through Bridgeport, and chatter increased as tongues and bodies visibly relaxed into the commute. Eve rode nearly to the end of the line before catching the eastbound Eighty-Seventh Street bus to Stony Island Avenue and walking the final block and a half home. Eve let herself into the house that she shared with her aunt. She dropped her bag beside the couch and watched the contents, including Brother LeRoi’s syllabus, spill out onto the floor.
“Every, is that you?” Ann called from her bedroom at the rear of the house.
“Yeah,” Eve sighed. “It’s me.” Entering her bedroom, she switched on the radio, collapsed onto the bed, and let herself believe that the Staple Singers could fulfill their promise of “I’ll Take You There.” This was one of the times when she wished she had kept her own apartment. But Ann’s strange illness, which first manifested when Eve went away for school and for which doctors could find no cause or cure, seemed to recur in Eve’s absence. One nurse had slipped and mentioned the word psychosomatic within Eve’s hearing. It had not been a shock to her. But she didn’t know what to do.
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