One of the Good Ones

by Maika Moulite

  “Hateful?” Mom says slowly over the phone. She’s trying the word out on her tongue as if it’s the first time she’s ever heard it.

  “Yes, hateful! The only reason we even stopped here today is because you insisted we visit this church in the first place, even when Genny tried to get us out of it. And then he’s up there saying all that trash... Did he know what Kezi was to me? That we loved each other?”

  “We all loved her!” my mom shouts back at Ximena. “How dare you, little girl? Now I don’t know how you speak to your mama but my children—”

  “Kezi was gay!” Ximena’s voice cracks into so many tiny pieces, fragments that no one can collect. Her voice is a whisper. “She was my girlfriend.”

  A gasp races out of my mouth. I don’t know what I thought Ximena was going to say, but it wasn’t that. Kezi was gay? Since when? How come I’m just finding out? Why didn’t she tell me?

  I glance between Genny and Derek, and they look away...because they already knew. Because they don’t want to watch the shock that is etched into my face. Derek stares down at his lap while Genny clenches Ximena’s hand, offering strength after her candor.

  My mother is still on the phone, breathing hard. She sounds like she’s gotten the wind knocked out of her. There’s a rustling over the speakers, and then my dad’s voice.

  “Hey. Um. Mom needs a minute... Let’s talk about this another time.”

  “Why can’t we talk about it now?” Genny says. She’s staring at the radio console like it’s our father’s face. “Don’t you think it’s terrible that your own child was afraid to share this with you?”

  I’ve never heard my parents so silent before. Genny takes a deep breath and continues, “I don’t agree with Ximena shouting all crazy like that at Ma, but I agree with what she’s saying. We’re on this trip because of Kezi. For Kezi. What sense would it have made for us to sit through and listen to Uncle Clyde say that stuff? Jesus. Even if Kezi wasn’t gay. I know it’s a lot for you to process, but this is who Kezi was. If we can’t accept this part of her, then we don’t accept any part of her.”

  “But...we didn’t raise you all to be...” Mom says. I can hear her choking back her tears.

  I know that my parents aren’t going to just accept this, right here, right now. Not the way we were brought up. And the way they were brought up. But Kezi isn’t here anymore. There’s no trying to pray this away, fixing it with a plane ticket to some torture camp. Or pushing it aside as simply a phase to be ignored. This version of Kezi is the last version of her to exist. More than that, it’s the true version. And while I try to imagine how my parents must be feeling, my thoughts turn, more importantly, to Kezi. How she had to sit through all those sermons made by pastors emphatically shouting that people like her would go to hell. How she must’ve felt, hiding this from Mom and Dad. From me... How could I have been left out of the loop? Again? But this is more than the loop. This is the world. Kezi’s world. And I’m so far out of its gravitational pull that it’s too late to bring me back.

  “So what, Mom? You think Kezi’s in hell now?” I ask.

  Silence stretches for longer than it should, as wide as the distance from Jasperilla, Missouri, to Los Angeles, California. It’s the saddest silence in the world.

  “We need time to process,” my dad says with finality. “We’ll talk to you all later.”

  No one says goodbye.

  19

  EVELYN

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 1937—

  80 YEARS, 8 MONTHS, 16 DAYS BEFORE THE ARREST

  GEORGIA

  Warm Springs smelled like a miracle. Evelyn had read and imprinted in her mind how much President Roosevelt credited the camp with his own physical rehabilitation. Now he stood tall when he addressed the country and Congress. And if he could get better, who was to say Mama couldn’t? As they entered Georgia, Evelyn tried to temper her excitement, put her hope on simmer. The chances that Warm Springs would be like the pool at Bethesda, where “the blind, the lame, the paralyzed” used to go for respite...the chances that just a dip would mean salvation...well, the chances of that were essentially none.

  But her daddy agreeing to make this stop at all, choosing to drive an hour beyond their actual destination of Atlanta, was proof enough that divine intervention was at play. Or maybe it was the desperate efforts of a man willing to do anything to help his ailing wife. Both? Both.

  By the time Mr. Hayes pulled up to the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, it was early evening the next day. The stress of the impromptu trip had him agitated, and he kept rubbing his hands over his thickening stubble that had slowly grayed with time and life’s stress. He couldn’t sleep, not when it was so clear he couldn’t protect his wife and daughter the way he wanted to as the man of the house. He didn’t think too long about what state their house must be in back home, because it made his vision blur. So he focused on what he had the capacity to control and kept on driving and driving and driving and didn’t stop until he’d somehow moved through five or six states, only pausing for gas and snacks at Green Book-vetted stations. Now they’d arrived at Georgia Hall.

  Antonin leapt out of the car and opened the door for Mrs. Hayes. Mr. Hayes grunted in acknowledgement as she giggled. Evelyn grabbed the crutches from the back seat and handed them to her mother. She gasped when she looked up at the imposing building, took in its four thick white columns that jutted the brick house forward so that it met up with the sea of green grass surrounding it. The man from the Bible had been paralyzed thirty-eight years, and his pool had been bordered with five colonnades...and Mrs. Hayes had been battling this sickness for only a couple of months...but this moment right here still felt holy.

  They had barely made it through the door when a woman carrying a stack of papers almost ran into their group. She looked up in masked aggravation.

  “Can I help you?” Her question’s intonation suggested that the answer better be no.

  “Yes, where do we check in so that my wife may use the services provided here?” Mr. Hayes asked. He smiled politely, a fruitless attempt to disarm white strangers into looking beyond his massive frame. (It never worked.)

  “Oh, that won’t be possible,” the woman said simply.

  “...we can pay whatever the—”

  She sighed heavily, clearly frustrated that this inconveniencing man was not understanding her.

  “Negroes aren’t known to have polio,” she said slowly. “The primitive natur—”

  “Ma’am—” Mr. Hayes tried again in his most deferential tone, squashing the distress Evelyn knew her father must have been feeling.

  “My physician diagnosed me with polio,” Mrs. Hayes interrupted crisply. “He said I was a textbook example of post-polio syndrome. I had polio as a child, and these symptoms have returned after—”

  “Be that as it may,” the woman said, eyeing Elsa’s crutches warily, as though expecting her to lash out with one at any moment. “The policy of Warm Springs is that we are an all-white institution. An all-white patient institution.” She corrected herself hastily as an older Black woman pushing a little white boy in his wheelchair walked by. “This is, after all, a very sensitive, hygienic environment. Why, President Roosevelt himself—”

  “But we donated to President Roosevelt’s Birthday Ball fund-raiser for this place,” Evelyn broke in, waving her crumpled flyer in the air. “My parents voted for him—”

  “Evelyn!” Her mother whispered her name, but it echoed louder than a shout in an empty coffee can. Antonin squeezed her shoulder in warning.

  Evelyn was shocked she had any tongue left, the number of times she was forced to bite it.

  * * *

  Back in the car, on the way to Atlanta and to Calvin:

  “You know what, Mama?”

  “Hmm.”

  “You remember that man from the Bible? He never made it to the pool either. J
esus went up to him special and healed him himself.”

  “‘Get up! Pick up your mat and walk,’” Mr. Hayes recited. “John 5 verse—”

  “That’s enough, Walker.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Hayes was lying right beyond that door. Mr. Hayes was drawing her a bath, and she would soon be swirling in the dirt of Georgia, in the filth of Warm Springs’s hypocrisy and denial. Evelyn had been debating with herself for the past several minutes. Leave her be? Console her? Mrs. Hayes typically got her energy from being with others, hearing them laugh as she took their measurements for a new piece. But since the polio, she’d retreated a bit within herself, to the only person around who completely understood how she was feeling.

  They’d picked up Calvin and had dinner at Mrs. Suttons Cafe, a lovely Green Book establishment just a few minutes from his dormitory. Evelyn’s brother ate steadily but quickly the entire night, prompting Evelyn to ask him when the last time was that he’d eaten.

  “A couple hours ago,” he’d said, looking at her strangely before biting into his meat loaf.

  Mrs. Hayes was happy to bask in the glow of her son, but her smile dimmed when they reached the Negro-friendly hotel nearest Mrs. Suttons: the Roosevelt. She’d gone into her and Mr. Hayes’s room the night they checked in and hadn’t left it for the rest of the evening.

  “There you are,” Antonin said, sneaking up behind Evelyn as she stood in front of the door that next morning.

  “What do you want?” Evelyn said listlessly. She stopped pacing.

  Antonin shuffled on the balls of his feet and handed her a heavy paper bag.

  “I know it’s nowhere near the same...” he began nervously.

  Evelyn pulled out an enormous navy blue box, with a little girl carrying an umbrella printed on the front. She sucked in a breath.

  Handed him the bag back and—

  Antonin’s face fell.

  “I’m sorry, Evelyn, I thought I’d get a few things from the store for your mother—I didn’t mean to—”

  She shook her head and pointed to her own bag, sitting in front of the hotel room door. Evelyn picked it up and pulled out the box of salt, tipped the bag’s opening to reveal the leaves and a few big rocks from the little garden out front, sticks of chalk, and a large bottle of soda water hidden inside.

  “Daddy and I went shopping and foraging this morning too,” she whispered. “We’ll make our own damned spring.”

  “What are you two doing dallying outside my room?” Mrs. Hayes’s voice rang out clear and startled them both.

  “Sorry, ma’am! I’m moving as we speak,” Antonin called out as he walked away, leaving his bag behind. He spun to face Evelyn while he rounded the corner. Grinned that grin.

  She smiled back and knocked on the door.

  20

  HAPPI

  MONDAY, JULY 30—

  3 MONTHS, 13 DAYS SINCE THE ARREST

  ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

  Go take a nap sometime, damn!

  In the moment, when I’d screamed those words at my sister, the laughs from our peers standing in the hallway had given me a morbid satisfaction. Of course, I hadn’t known that our interaction that day would be our last...but even though I had felt judged, attacked, and misunderstood, the way I’d retaliated was unfair. If I had known that was to be our final conversation, what would I have said? How do you prepare your closing monologue to someone you never really said true first words to?

  I love you?

  All of you.

  I’m sorry for everything.

  I forgive what you said.

  I was jealous, but you must already know that.

  You and Genny were perfect, and I was—

  I’m going to miss you.

  You stole a piece of my spirit when you—

  Happy birthday.

  To die on the day that you’re born seems impossible. Birth is all about the potential, the opportunity, the big, bad world unfolding before you to share its infinite secrets. Even parents staring at their new infants through the sanitized glass of a NICU window keep faith by dwelling on tomorrow, on hope, on the belief that life will blossom for their baby. They just got here, my God!

  And from that day on, a birthday is a rebirth. It’s the extra life in a video game, the squeeze that gets your legs moving after a charley horse. We do not think about deathdays. Not at seventeen years old. Eighteen. Not when everyone looked at my sister and saw greatness, smelled her future doused all over her.

  The Saturday after Kezi’s birthday, after what became her deathday, we had a gathering at our house. It wasn’t the official funeral repast, just the friends Kezi had planned on inviting over that weekend to cut cake with her. Student council members. Speech and debate clubbers. Derek. Ximena...

  I almost tripped going down the stairs when I heard voices coming from Kezi’s room after I’d left the bathroom. I saw red. Who would dare go in there? The creak from someone sitting on her bed was unmistakable. The choked-back sob of what sounded like a female voice made me pause.

  “Shh. Shh. I know,” Derek’s deep, gentle voice whispered.

  “She was my girl.” That was all I could make out, but I knew it was Ximena.

  Kezi was their North Star, whether they acknowledged it or not. She was the friend in their trio who had the strongest ties to the other points of the triangle. At first, I was surprised to learn that Derek hadn’t been with them at the rally, but then I remembered how cautious he was, even in grade school.

  I left them alone. They were grieving too. And Ximena’s words, murmured in confidence behind closed doors, had remained unspoken for. Until now.

  * * *

  We are so, so high.

  Six hundred and thirty feet in the sky to be exact.

  The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is, according to Kezi’s meticulous notes, the tallest monument in America. It’s over twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. But while the patina coppered liberty goddess evokes an eternal call to freedom and supposed hope and rest for weary immigrants, the gateway arch is all business.

  It’s my turn to handle the camera, and I do my best to steady the video without a tripod but almost drop it a few times. I focus on the view from a wide window, where the city with its dotting of trees, parks, and sharp buildings looks up at me. I train the lens on Derek, who has cleared his throat and is skimming a piece of paper from Kezi’s magical notebook.

  “Yeah. June 20, 1803. From Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis... ‘The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river; & such principal stream of it, as by its course & communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purpose of commerce.’”

  Fellow visitors of the arch stop as he speaks, probably curious about what the dark-skinned boy in the high-top fade and quivering voice is getting at.

  “Translation?” Ximena says. She has been more subdued since the phone call in Jasperilla. I mean...who could attempt to blame her?

  “Basically, Thomas Jefferson wanted to discover what was out there to the west, to grow the United States in stature and finances.”

  Genny, Derek, and Ximena snap their heads in my direction, and I capture their (insultingly) shocked faces on tape. I stare right back in defiance, refusing to concede that it is a little...off brand...for me to know a fact like that.

  Not that I owe anyone an explanation, but I couldn’t sleep last night. Like most nights. I tossed and turned, unable to stop thinking about how my parents had clearly lost their damn minds. And that I knew even less about Kezi than I’d thought. But why was I surprised? Each time she’d tried to reveal bits of herself to me, I took the pieces that she handed over and threw them right back. Of course she hadn’t told me she and Ximena were a couple. It was my fault.

  Eventually, when I gav
e up all hope of sleep finding me, I pulled my laptop into bed and researched our location. I was up until the wee hours of the morning, self-enrolled in a crash course to learn all the things Kezi would’ve known. I tried to imagine what my sister would have been drawn to when she was putting together our trip, what she wanted us to learn. The more I read, the closer I felt to her. This would be my way of competing with all the secrets and stories those closest to Kezi had to share.

  Genny recovers fastest.

  “Something a lot of folks don’t know is how the US was even able to go through with the Louisiana Purchase in the first place,” she says.

  But I know.

  “The slaves in Haiti revolted and, thanks to their clutch guerilla warfare and yellow fever, the French military sent to contain them lost. Badly. Eventually, Napoleon decided to give up his ideas of making a French empire in the New World. And since he already had a potential war with England to deal with, he sold almost nine hundred thousand square miles west of the Mississippi for a cool fifteen mill.”

  I glare pointedly in their direction at the end of my speech, daring them to say something. Ximena looks like she wants to hug me, but Derek shakes his head almost imperceptibly at her, and she keeps her hands to herself.

  ALL LIVES MATTER.

  RIP generationkeZi.

  RIP

  YouTubers are always begging people to comment, like, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, and when they finally get a few followers, they fall off smh.

  You idiot she died a few months ago.

  RIP

  You did not die in vain, everyone will know your name

  Love you

  Over one hundred thousand followers. That’s how many people clicked on that red rectangular subscribe button after coming across a video of Kezi saying something, anything, and decided, in that instant, yeah, I’ll take more of this. Scrolling through the comments gives me access to another side of Kezi, something else she had to deal with. Many of the messages I’d skimmed through were neutral to positive. But not all. When you’re a young, Black woman speaking up online about the prison industrial complex or voter suppression laws, a chorus of hateful, fearful, violent rhetoric rises up with you too. Frightening, yes, but also a reminder of why you’re speaking up in the first place.