by Kate Manning
Milo nodded.
“Think about him, let’s see that on your face, what King wrote: ‘The question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremists will we be?’ Remember that part? Cade’s an extremist. Right? He’s gonna bust out. You put that in your face, you feel it down there in that jail.”
Milo listened. He kept his eyes averted but he nodded. When they called action Milo jumped up and got ready. He sat in the dark like a coiled snake with a blue half-light on his face from above, a leak of sky coming in, and water dripping down stones behind him. The camera stayed on his face for a long time. In that shot, watching later, I saw things about Milo. Desperation and rage and resolve. It didn’t seem to be acting. He didn’t talk. He just sat, swallowed. He was sweating and his fingers worked the flesh of his face. But not too much. He was subtle; riveting, really.
And then he burst out with a roar. Cade broke through the top of the cage and that was the end of that sequence. They said cut and Darryl was right there, pounding Milo’s back, saying “You did it, you aced it, you got it,” collaring his neck.
Milo always had a coach. He had these talents—skiing, and now acting, too—but he needed somebody to tell him techniques, things he wanted to learn. Right now Darryl was Milo’s coach. He was always around, always calling Milo and sending stuff—books and tapes and documents. The piles in the bedroom, in the study, by the TV, were getting higher. Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and biographies of King and W.E.B. Du Bois. Milo didn’t spend too much time with it that I could tell, not then, anyway. The two of them were thick as thieves, obsessed with the movie. It was good for Milo, I thought, to have a friend like Darryl.
I was too tired all the time to pay much attention to Cade. I napped in Milo’s trailer, not noticing that I was gradually becoming nothing but an incubator. I couldn’t work as a model, not after showing in the third month. I developed a habit of standing with my back swayed and my stomach stuck forward so nobody would think I was merely fat, which is how it looked to me. It wore me out, all that bulk, that napping, waiting for Milo, waiting for lunch, waiting for dinner, waiting for nine months to be up. I missed Claire.
“Hello, Claire, it’s me, the Incubator.”
“Yes?” Claire said, in her office voice, then whispering, “I can’t talk. I’ll call you back.” She was busy being a lawyer, a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office, and was married now, to her boyfriend, Tim, who had always reminded me of myself in one major way—how much he loved Claire, and depended on her. I liked Tim, but he was always around, cramping her conversation. It wasn’t the same.
I filled up my time reading books that described the formation of a human being, week by week. In the twelfth and thirteenth weeks, I picked out carpeting for the living room of our marvelous new Malibu manse, while somewhere down in central Charlotte, ears were growing, buds of fingers and toes. In the twentieth week, when the pictures in my book showed that what I carried was a luminous alien in a gossamer sac, I glued glow-stars to the ceiling of the baby’s room. In the twenty-eighth week, I tried to remember how to knit, laboring over a microscopic white sweater till the wool turned gray. When it was time, in week 30, for hair follicles to form and sprout, I was going to classes to learn the special breathing, closing my eyes and thinking of eyelashes, wishing them long and luxurious, like Milo’s.
All along, my dreams were strange, every night teeming with weird life: babies being born from the top of my head; or the foot of the baby sticking straight up from my middle and then turning into a submarine periscope, spying on me; or Milo delivering the baby instead of me. Ha. Even I knew my unspoken panic when I dreamed it. That no one would recognize me as the mother, that I would not recognize myself. I never said any of this or told anyone. Which is a good idea, sometimes, to just shut up and keep your thoughts to yourself. I wish I’d learned that then, since, as soon as I saw her, I knew she was mine, and I was hers.
Halsey Jane Robicheaux, called Hallie, was born in Cedars-Sinai Hospital on March 12, 1985. Funny-looking as a bald squirrel, Milo said, shy to admit she was beautiful as nothing else in this world, with eyes dark blue as the sky at night, pricks of light in their centers. We loved her so much, Hallie, Up to here, as she herself now says about love, up to the universe and back. She was breathtaking. The smell of her could break your heart.
All I ever wanted, I thought.
Milo took the baby from the nurse. He was there in the delivery room. He was the first one of us to hold her. He knew how right away. She fit in his hands like a bird. His face was full of wonder and raw feeling. He couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t stop smiling. We got her home and he lay her on the bed, stretched out alongside her, this big man gazing down. She yawned with her mouth in an O.
“You sleepy girl,” he said. “You tired peanut.” She closed her eyes and he put his face right down next to hers. “Shhhh,” he said. “That’s right.”
We stared down at her sleeping in her pink and white bed, her tiny heart of a mouth sucking milk in dreams. I picked her up and her arms flew out like wings. Her head rested in the crook of my neck, the crook of my elbow, the circle of my arm while I lay feeding her. Milo sat with her sleeping on his chest, her wrinkly, newborn fist tight around one of his fingers. She was the gold color of good bread. Her hair was black and fine. I whorled it around with my free hand while I fed her. I fed her constantly. I was a human restaurant. I was up with her nursing in the dark, walking her up and down the halls, singing lullabies whose words I somehow knew. When you wake, you shall have, all the pretty little horses.
I seemed to know a lot of things. Lullabies. How to nurse. It was the best feeling. Sexual, practically. I could get arrested for saying so, but it’s true; I don’t know what else to say it comes close to. How that baby roots and latches on ferociously, desperate. The pull of that suck goes right down through you and you feel it like you feel your own desire, in all the same places. The heart especially. I loved it. I loved her. Her hand, with its pink chips of fingernail, reached and held on, kneading my skin. She was ecstatic, swallowing and murmuring and falling asleep with crooked smiles on her milky lips. She was drunken. She was smitten. She was gorgeous. Love was welling up and choking me. I leaked milk just thinking of her. Really. I’d be in the kitchen and she’d be off in her crib and I’d have a thought of her and right away my shirt would be soaked. It was beyond my control. My daughter. God, Hallie. If you knew how much your mother loves you.
And your father.
He got tears in his eyes all the time, looking at Hallie. He gave her so many names, endearments. Miss Lady, Sweetcake, Hallie Ballie Bee. He gave her one of his fingers to hold. “She likes me,” he said. When she got colicky, he carried her up and down, talking to her, telling her things.
One night he showed her the stars. “Look up there,” he said, standing with her at the window. “Planets.” He said all their nine names, Mars to Pluto. “The way you remember them, is by this: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts.” I swear Hallie was listening to him, four weeks old, not crying as long as he talked, kept walking. “You say it now. Thatta girl.” My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Peanuts. “My own educated mother taught me that. Your grandma.”
Milo’s parents came when we were just home from the hospital. Hattie couldn’t wait, she said, she was trembling. She put her arms around me, first thing, before she even looked at the baby, and she said, “Charlotte, honey. We’re so proud of you.”
I felt proud, because of the way she said it. I don’t know why. Women have babies all day long. Big deal. But it was, it felt big to me, like an accomplishment. And the way Hattie hugged me made me think: Maybe she could even love me, someday.
Hattie was a wreck over that baby. With Hallie in her arms, her face had no reserve, no guard up. She never quite recovered the annoyed way she used to have with me. Sit sit sit, sit now, I’ll do it. She was always making a fool of herself baby-talking and going through the repertoire of singsongs that she ha
d: skinamarink a dink and maresey doats. Nonsense like that.
Mr. Robicheaux, too. Milton. But not in public. Not at first. He was formal.
He said he thought he’d like to be called Grandfather, not Pa or Gramps. But one morning I started into Hallie’s room and saw him looking at her. He didn’t know I was watching. He picked her up with two fingers behind her head, her small form lying the length of his forearms. He was whispering to her: Yes, ma’am. Yessir. Yes, ma’am, yes. I got my camera and came back. He didn’t hear me. I took his picture. As soon as he heard the shutter click, he straightened up, put Hallie back in the crib, pushed his glasses back, cleared his throat. “Very cute, very cute,” he said, as if I’d caught him at something secret. We have the picture. It shows his face in profile with hers, both of them wrinkly, old and new. I’m always struck by the lovesick look on Milton’s face, when I see that picture. Those Robicheaux men, you know. Softies for a baby.
They stayed two weeks. Hattie taught me everything she knew about germ prevention and swaddling. She pampered me with naps and praised me for no reason. “Look at her, Milo, look how Charlotte changes that didie.” It started to get to me after a while, the lispy baby-talk way she had with Hallie, but I was sorry when she left. It was right around that time that I started to love her. More than my own mother. I’m not sorry to say it.
After three months, Barbara and Arthur had not come to meet Hallie. Conestoga was a two-hour plane ride, but they couldn’t get to L.A. Because, Barbara said, “I don’t know if I’m, I’m not sure I’m really ready, and you know the first weeks are very trying, tiring, I mean, and …”
Ready for what? She hurt me.
After five months, after Diana shamed her into using one of the tickets I sent, my mother finally met Hallie. My father, she said, had thrown his back out and couldn’t come after all. His back apparently remained out for about a year, since that’s how old Hallie was when they finally met.
“I’m so surprised,” Barbara whispered. “She’s very, she’s almost, she’s pink.” I did not say she will darken with age, like cherry wood. I did not say Wait until the melanin kicks in. I watched her. She gazed down at her perfect, black-haired granddaughter and traced her salmon-colored fingernail gently down Hallie’s cheek. She picked her up and held her tenderly, hummed, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Hallie looked up at her with big eyes dark as a seal’s.
“Mom,” I said, “don’t sing that.”
“Why?”
“Just … I can’t explain.” I shook my head. I hurt her feelings so she had to leave the room for a minute. I shouldn’t have been so critical of her. She meant well, she really did, and she loved Hallie, I could see it in her face. But I didn’t want her around. She brought miniature T-shirts from her church that said “Little Lamb of God” on them. She sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.
I took Hallie from her, into another room.
“Well, I was just trying to be helpful,” she said, following me with her furious smile on.
“It’s time to feed her,” I said, though it wasn’t.
She watched me nurse. It was excruciating. She averted her eyes and said, “I never did that, you know, with you children. It wasn’t considered sanitary.”
“I could boil my breasts,” I said. “That would be sanitary.”
This was not funny to her at all. She looked disgusted. Just the word “breasts” was a shock for her to hear, but I didn’t care. Breasts breasts breasts. I could say it as much as I wanted now. Intercourse! I was married and a mother. She left after only a couple of days, and went back up to Conestoga to report to my father on their surprisingly pink new granddaughter.
24.
We had a baby now. This changes everything. No one realizes. They tell you about the afterbirth but not about the aftermath. Not about how the sneaky baby rearranges you thoroughly, like snow in the night, transforming everything familiar, every twig and blade of grass. This is what happened to us when Hallie was born. She snowed us in. And right at the same time, Milo became Cade. He was captive of evil bloodless aliens, and I was captive of a tiny honey baby. Everything changed at once. It all whacked out at once.
Hallie was born, and Cade opened two months later. It was nonstop Milomania. The Hollywood Reporter coined the term, Milomania. You could not find a single freeway without a Cade billboard. You could not turn on the TV without seeing my husband on some morning show, some afternoon show. Milo became Cade, and everybody knows that story.
What was so brilliant about the movie was that it was science fiction. The slaves were played by all races and ages of people. But by casting Milo as the rebel leader, and Klaus Krieger, a man white as teeth, in the role of the Cryotron Emperor, the story of Cade, Rebel Fury took on significance much closer to home than a galaxy far, far away.
Even Milo didn’t see how powerful it was, not until the day after the opening when we went downtown to watch the movie in a real city theater, anonymously. It was Milo’s idea. He put on a baseball cap and sunglasses. We went at lunchtime with Hallie, eight weeks old. She slept through the whole thing. It was during the part where the rebels are fighting, smashing the aliens with chunks of Ore and pickaxes, that we heard the murmurs in the audience: Yeah, brother! Kill that white son of a bitch! And in the scene where the rebels got the Ore, some in the audience shouted: Drink it down, brothers! Get the power! When the glowing blue liquid did nothing, when all that superior strength and brainpower was found to be a charade, a silence came over the people watching. Uh-huh, somebody said. That’s the truth.
We walked out of the theater before the lights came up and blinked. “Holy shit,” Milo said. He kept saying that. “Holy shit.”
“What?”
“Darryl was right,” he said finally.
“About what?”
“He said it’s more than a movie.” Milo was shaking his head.
“What does he say it is, then?”
“A bombshell.”
After the first weekend, in Los Angeles and Detroit, Chicago and New York, police details were posted outside theaters in black neighborhoods where the movie was playing. Disturbances were anticipated. (They should be disturbed, Darryl said.) People stayed peaceful, but they were not calm. They lined up around the block for Cade. White teenagers were some of Cade’s biggest fans. When asked by a reporter for the Times why Cade was a hero, a white kid said: “He’s a rebel, man. A human rebel.” Whereas the black kids who were interviewed all said something along the lines of: “He’s a great black leader.” The movie was not what anybody would call a critical smash (“This heavy-handed allegory stars the magnetic black Olympian Milo Robicheaux …” one said), but it made $168.2 million and, for a few years, a hero out of my husband. From Cade, Rebel Fury was born Milo Robicheaux, the New Black Messiah. Or so some people seemed to believe.
“What’s next for you, Milo?”
From the living room couch Hallie and I watched Milo on TV, fielding questions from a daytime talk-show host. “What’s next for this new star? He’s an athlete, a screen artist, a born crossover crowd-pleaser,” the woman said. “Can politics be far behind?” There’s Daddy, I whispered to Hallie, made her wave her little hand at him. She seemed to recognize him, honestly, she did. I told him later how her eyes got big and she bicycled her legs when she heard him answer.
“Well, gee, Marsha, I don’t rule anything out,” Milo said. “Certainly it would be an honor to be involved in public service. At the moment, I’m concentrating on my career as an actor—”
“But just tell us, what are the issues that most concern you?” The host was a black woman named Marsha Mays, and she leaned toward Milo with great expectations in her eyes.
“I’d have to say, Marsha—and this is just hypothetical, of course—that I’d be interested in the health and well-being of all people, and of course, as Cade says in the movie: justice.” Milo raise
d his eyebrows and smiled at the camera, as if all the audience knew exactly what he meant by that line.
“Justice,” Marsha repeated solemnly.
It was in this way that people began to look at Milo not as some novelty skier or B-movie actor but as somebody who might be the answer to their prayers. And it was in this way that Milo was set up to think he was hearing prayers for all the usual reasons: deity. Power of the genie-in-a-bottle kind. If people like Marsha Mays and kids on the street think you’re a god, or a savior, how long does it take before you believe them?
Darryl hired Milo a staff. A manager, a secretary, an accountant, a travel agent, a driver, a publicist. He offered to hire us a baby nurse but we didn’t want one. We’re Hallie’s parents, we said. We’ll take care of her. He got people to hire us baby-sitters when we needed them. He hired Milo a bodyguard. Every single one of the staff was a black person. We’re black owned and operated! Darryl said, and we were all proud of that fact, me included. The publicist was part of an exclusive company called the Ray Group, headed by a woman named Liz Ray. Milo affectionately called her Lizard, and I spoke to her on the phone all the time. She was always working two or three phones simultaneously and talking about Milo’s needs. He’ll need his driver at six AM. He’ll need to be out of there by two-fifteen because he needs to meet his trainer at two-thirty. He’ll need you to respect his private life. Absolutely not. He’ll need to see the questions in advance. She booked Milo everywhere. On the daytime shows, on radio, on sitcoms. He was on Johnny Carson, then on Cosby, playing himself. Milo was thrilled by it, so excited. He never acted as if it were ordinary, all that press attention. He was still normal, I thought, not some Hollywood slicko. “I’m so happy for you,” I said. “Isn’t it great?”
But actually, it wasn’t, entirely. I was having a hard time. We had a new baby. We had a bodyguard. We couldn’t go anywhere or have any privacy because Milo was famous, and I was—threatened, if you want to know the truth. The more you saw Milo, the harder it was to see me. I felt transparent as the wings of a housefly.