Eve poured herself a glass of water from a pitcher on the small porch table. She recalled the imposing image of Cornelius from the photograph she discovered in her Chicago basement. Even in her mind he was intimidating. Yet Gertrude had not believed that he’d harmed Mercy, and even though her grandmother made questionable decisions regarding Cornelius, Eve chose to believe as she had—that Cornelius was not her father. He was a murderer who they allowed to be taken.
“Do you feel bad about that, Ms. Evelyn?” Eve asked.
“Killin’ the man that killed your granddaddy? Nawl.” Evelyn stared at the horizon. “’Course, I don’t feel nothin’ bad at the moment.” She pulled on her pipe.
Sixteen
warmth of other suns
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .
I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new
and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth
of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom.
—Richard Wright, Black Boy
Between the time of World War I and the early 1970s, nearly six million African Americans left the South. Spreading northward and westward, they sought to escape the severe racial oppression of the South and searched for better opportunities. They left in droves by bus, rail, car, and even on foot in what is now called the Great Migration. Writer Richard Wright left the Mississippi plantation of his birth for Chicago, for, as he coined it, “the warmth of other suns.” Within this pipeline of leaving were women who sought to escape oppressions within their communities. The abused wife, who was smuggled not north but to a neighboring town; the daughters who feared being married off so that there’d be fewer mouths to feed; the sisters who whored themselves to neighboring farm men so that their own land could be worked—they, too, sought the warmth of other suns.
In 1913 Luella Gaines boarded the AB&A train out of Ideal. She chased a dream of reconnecting with the white father of her three-year-old son, Cornelius, his namesake. She’d heard that he had gone to New Orleans and hoped that the nuanced racial politics of the Creoles would provide refuge for a light-colored woman, her white lover, and their dark child. She may have been right in that assumption, but Luella would never find the white Cornelius, just as her son would never find her when he boarded the same train fourteen years later. It had taken Luella three years of bearing the town’s shame to decide to leave. Yet her own father had acted much sooner. The elder Gaines had seen the Railroad try to take his land, declare his well defunct, and defile his daughter. Luella rode that train unaware that Gaines had shot white Cornelius three years prior and tossed the body into the freshly constructed dry well.
In 1950 Mercy Mann boarded the AB&A train out of Ideal. She carried only a small suitcase in her hand and, even smaller, the growing fetus in her stomach. Mercy hadn’t wanted to leave home, but it had ceased to be a place of comfort. She was bombarded with questions from those closest to her and stares from those who weren’t. Spite kept her from denouncing the rumors that Cornelius was the father of her child. He had murdered her own father without repercussion. Fear prevented her from claiming James as the father. She could not tie herself to that life. She hoped to find other women like herself in Chicago. Wild women who shunned the social expectations of the times. She was right, of course. She would have found a haven on Chicago’s south side, where Blacks, the red-light district, and queers were making peace with being cramped into the same area. But Mercy never found this utopian nugget. She shared a one-bedroom tenement apartment with cousins who were so distant that they were no longer related. She worked twelve-hour days cleaning until the pregnancy prevented it and bore the scornful looks from her cousins as she remained on bed rest. It had been clear for many hours during her labor that things were not going as they should; still, the cousins waited too long before getting her to the hospital.
She had felt encased in light, and perhaps this was the other sun to which she was destined. The bedsheets were soaked with her blood, while everything else was soaked in clarity for Mercy. She felt the connection of all things so clearly—all people drenched in the same light. Some know it as God, but in that moment, Mercy was aware that it was so much more than the constructions of God that she was taught, more than the scriptures that her sister had once hurled at her, more than what was preached from the pulpit. What she felt, everyone and everything was part of it. Seamlessly so. In an effort to impart this epiphany to those around her, she murmured, “Every man is a child of God.” Confused, the nurses only heard “every man.” Knowing Mann to be her last name, they mistook this final sentence as a naming rite.
In 1972 Every Mann waited for the Greyhound bus out of Ideal. She had received a ride to the Quick Mart from Deuce, who stood beside her, hands at his sides and uncertain of what to do, so he waited with her for the bus’s arrival. It arrived at the same time James pulled his pickup into the parking lot. Deuce tipped his hat toward Eve and left her wondering if he knew of his wife’s hand in the death of the man who was like a son to him. Ideal was a time capsule of information that Eve could barely process. It overwhelmed her and these new memories rushed over her in waves as one recovering from amnesia. She had not changed, but this new knowledge gave her the feeling of a new life, one with a history. Unaccustomed to it, she had no idea what one did with a history. She had longed for it but was now uncomfortably aware of how it differed from a past. A past was unique and individual; a history was deep and shared.
James carried a brown paper sack and walked hesitantly toward her. Eve vaguely recognized him from the pictures at Geneva’s house and was relieved when he spoke first.
“My wife, you know Geneva, didn’t want you to get off half-starved.” He thrust the sack into her hands.
Eve smiled. “I appreciate it.”
James swiped imaginary dust from his pants and shifted from one leg to the other. “I, uh . . . I was close friends with your people growing up.” He had caught Eve’s attention. The driver began loading passenger luggage into the undercarriage of the bus.
James and Eve stared at each other in the way of those who want to make a full study of it but can only afford a series of glances strung together in the hope of creating a lingering picture. They stood side by side in silence. Eve did not receive any divine last-minute knowledge that she was a breath away from her father. James did not get hit with an urge to confess his relationship to her. Southern decorum dictated the pacing of such things, and surprise revelations were best left in the realm of soap opera dramas.
There were some physical similarities between the two, but nothing particularly noticeable. Only someone who had made a serious study of them would do a double take at the father and daughter in passing. They had the same ears, but no one notices ears unless they are unusual. Eve had her mother’s hands, which James would appreciate, still having issues with his own. They had the same eyes, unremarkable except to those who fell in love with them. When Eve’s gaze darted furtively and caught James, she rested on his eyes and felt a peace that she wouldn’t recognize until a later time. Her mouth, full and well-shaped, was Mercy’s, and when she smiled, James felt a hint of the fatherhood pride he had never known in his life.
Eve boarded the Greyhound, mirroring James’s one-handed farewell as the bus pulled out of the only Ideal city in Georgia. She thought of Nelle, the one person with whom she wanted to unpack her experience. For some reason, Eve felt more grounded and less threatened by Nelle. Perhaps her biggest issue with her friend was that she had possessed a history, a treasure, and barely paid it any attention. Not that Eve knew what one did with a history, but she was sure that Nelle was misusing her own. Now she was beginning to grasp that part of one’s birthright was in deciding what one would do with history. It was just as much her prerogative to uncover it as it was her aunt’s to bury it. She’d spent most of her l
ife fighting to learn who she was and lumping together Mama Ann, Nelle, and classroom bullies, and now she’d have to extricate each of them and reexamine her relationship to them.
She thought of Brother LeRoi and his funny little egg. A beginning, he had called it. Her history was a beginning from which she emerged. Her own fragile but resilient egg. Brother LeRoi, and Woodridge before him, held on to the egg. They brought it out for an occasional examination that had more to do with themselves than the object. Sometimes they held onto it for too long, and guilt crept in. Sometimes they thought of discarding it, but obligation prevented them. Woodridge passed it down, bequeathing it to those he deemed worthy. For LeRoi, the egg and his mother’s letter would remain untampered with.
Eve would be a couple of hours into her journey before she opened the paper bag stuffed with oranges, pecans, potato chips, and the fried chicken that had been wrapped in foil straight out of the grease pan. “It’ll stay hot longer that way,” Geneva had told James. It had remained hot, but it had also leaked. The fruit had a greasy film, and at the bottom of the bag, a grease-stained envelope with Eve’s name scrawled on the outside had absorbed the remaining oil. Geneva and James had written the letter together, filling in only a few more of the gaps in Eve’s quest for information.
It had taken them the better part of the night and had involved lots of tears and silences followed by cathartic confessions. They absolved each other for loving Mercy and comforted each other for losing her.
“We were just kids.” Geneva dabbed at her eyes, remembering the shed and scorning her inability to not make martyrs of each kiss she and Mercy had shared.
“Don’t make it no less real, baby.” James patted her hand. “We were all kids. And that girl—Mercy and me . . . we still did that. We still—” His voice cracked.
Geneva embraced her husband. “She’s a beautiful young lady.”
He nodded and pressed himself to her as if he were trying to hide his large body in his wife’s smaller form.
Geneva continued to hold him and stroke his back. “She’s called Eve.”
“That’s beautiful,” James murmured into her chest.
“Says it’s short for Every,” she added and felt James stiffen.
He gazed up at her. “What’s that?”
Geneva sighed. “Every Mann.” James slowly shook his head. The name confounded them both, and their combined pity inspired the letter writing.
By the time Eve would open their letter, the hodgepodge of smudges and stains would resemble the redacted narrative she already possessed.
But she would know the one thing that would change her existence. Eve would know her name.
acknowledgments
My mother was the head librarian at Avalon Branch Library on Chicago’s south side, so my childhood was filled with books and well-read Black folk (mostly women) whose literary knowledge could rival Google. They were the internet before there was an internet. I learned how to ride my bike in the library after hours, when Charles Freeney Jr. (perhaps the greatest curator this world has known) popped popcorn and played Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” on the record player. I was raised by librarians, and I must express my gratitude to that community and my early introduction to it by my mother, Jerri Conner, and her sister-friend circle (the Divas), my honorary aunts: Mary Williams, Faye Hardiman, Eloise Smith, Frances Littlejohn (RIP), and Marie Smith (RIP).
My parents are southerners who relocated to Chicago during the Great Migration. The South has always been an adjacent home space for me, nurtured by summers with my grandmother Sudie Mae Wright in Memphis. everyman parallels the Great Migration and also takes 1920, the year of my grandmother’s birth, as its chronological beginning.
This story coalesced from my previously mentioned beginnings, my mother’s genealogical research of our family, and my experiences teaching in Chicago Public Schools—specifically, when I attempted to start genealogy projects with my students. It took form during my study at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Program for Writers and was refined over many years (about a decade). Thank you to my dissertation committee: Cris Mazza, Jennie Brier, Madhu Dubey, Chris Grimes, and Natasha Barnes.
After UIC, I delved more into the spaces and eras depicted in everyman, and I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to Dr. Loretta Burns and Dana Chandler (Tuskegee University) and Jackie Anderson (RIP, a great lesbian mentor).
I cannot stress enough the importance of Black books by Black writers. My literary forefolk: Zora Neale Hurston’s storytelling and curation of Black life; Toni Morrison’s linguistic ingenuity; Alice Walker’s queer narratives; James Baldwin’s fire within; Isabelle Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns; and Edward P. Jones, because it was The Known World that made me set aside the first incarnation of everyman and start applying to grad school.
everyman took a lot of noes. Its first yes came from my superstar agent, Beth Marshea at Ladderbird Agency. Thank you for always advocating on my behalf and for introducing me to my wonderful editor, Marita Golden. Thank you to Blackstone Publishing for all the yeses.
Finally (because if I started here, I wouldn’t have mentioned anyone else), my love, partner, support, wife, and mermaid, Tiffany. You’ve seen how emotionally draining this work can be, and you reinvigorate me.
To my friends (Chicago and beyond) and family that are too many to name: Thank you all. I love you.
about the author
M Shelly Conner, a Chicago native, spent her summers bouncing between her grandmother in Memphis and relatives in Los Angeles, reveling in the sprawl of the Great Migration. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A multigenre writer, she is the creator of the Quare Life web series and has published essays on dapperqueer aesthetics, black womanhood, self-sustainable living, and their intersections in various publications, including the A.V. Club, TheGrio, Playboy, and The Crisis. An excerpt of everyman appears in the Obsidian Journal of Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Conner is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and lives in Arkansas with her wife and their dog, Whiskey.
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