Rebel Yell Page 10

“Yes,” said Waycross.

  “Have you slept with her?” asked Ajay.

  “On long past occasion,” said Waycross.

  “Why did she call our house?” asked Ajay.

  “That would have been her gal friend,” said Waycross.

  They finished the rest of their meal in a silence punctuated by the snorting sound of Waycross sucking too hard on his Frosty. He was sorry he had lied to Ajay but it was a necessary sorry. After they cleared the remnants of the meal to the trash bins and the tray stacks, Ajay refilled his Coke and Waycross bought a coffee to go.

  They were back on the road. Waycross took the wheel. He needed to achieve a semblance of control for himself.

  Ajay turned on the satellite radio and quickly found a jazz station.

  “I’m starting to like Miles,” said Ajay.

  “And Thelonius?”

  “Not Thelonius. Gil Evans.”

  “Born Ernest Gilmore Green.”

  “He changed it to his stepfather’s name.”

  “Or he changed it to make it sound less Jewish.”

  “I prefer my explanation.”

  “Me too.”

  Ajay wasn’t as sad as he’d thought he would be. He wasn’t even as sad as he’d thought he should be. It was, what it be. And the man sitting beside him, the man who had told him something near the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it hadn’t looked pretty on him, the man who had spilled his own secrets to distract Ajay from sorrow, wasn’t the only daddy Ajay had but he was his best daddy. Hope Jones hadn’t raised no fool. Ajay knew he was lucky to have a daddy driving him to Idlewild to mourn his daddy.

  Waycross was flattered that his stepson wanted to bury some of his sorrow in the same lake where Waycross had buried his daddy’s ashes.

  It was half sideways but Hope had given Waycross a son, and Waycross was going to do what he could to help Ajay mourn Abel.

  Ajay and Waycross were listening to Kenny Burrell play “This Time the Dream’s on Me” as they passed the sign that read, WELCOME TO MICHIGAN, GREAT LAKES, GREAT TIMES.

  Part II

  ON SATURDAY, MARCH 6, 1965, Abel and his daddy were headed to Selma. Big Abel pointed the Flying Crow south for what turned out to be its last trip to Alabama as the Jones family vehicle.

  Big Abel’s school-teaching frat brother, Randall Pettus, a part-time deacon who worshipped at Brown AME Chapel, had invited them down for a local march.

  Abel, going on six, a young veteran of the Movement, was his father’s traveling companion of choice.

  When they drove past the turnoff to Birmingham, Big Abel started talking about “the funeral.” Abel claimed he didn’t remember the little girls’ funeral. Instead of stopping talking, his father told him all about it again. About the little shoes. About Addie, Denise, and Cynthia as well as Carole. He said Denise had been only five years older than Little Abel was now. Little Abel was wondering why they were headed to a church if children got blown up in churches. He knew better than to pose this question aloud.

  They arrived in Selma in time for Saturday night supper. Abel liked the other boy, Wade. Wade was yellow and wide with brown plastic glasses. Saturday night the daddies wore blue jeans and plaid shirts and the little boys did too. The daddies drank scotch and grilled hamburgers while the little boys watched teevee.

  The next day the fathers wore suits and ties and overcoats and the little boys wore their Sunday suits with their warm school jackets over them. With the boys in the middle holding hands and their daddies on the outside, they formed a phalanx of four. They marched from the church about six hundred strong down to the bridge.

  Wade and Abel traded jokes along the way and they sang one of the songs they had been taught to sing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round, I’m gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, Lord, keep on praying, Lord.”

  They were so noisy, and the crowd was so noisy, they didn’t notice, and their fathers didn’t notice, how silent the town had become. They made six blocks and then it was horrible.

  People, men and women, were falling, in lines, to their knees to pray. Other people, all men, were hitting the kneeling men and women in the head with thick sticks.

  Later Abel learned these sticks were called billy clubs or batons. Some of the people didn’t drop to their feet to pray or sing, they screamed and ran.

  The police looked like toy army men all dressed the same way, in light-colored pants and dark shirts and helmets, with some kind of strap across their chests and guns on their hips.

  Young Abel saw this, then he saw nothing. He and Wade dropped hands. He felt his father lifting him in his arms. Abel’s eyes were burning. Big Abel fell to the ground. Abel wasn’t holding his father’s hand anymore. Abel was running away from the river.

  He found his way back to the church with the help of a woman in a neat dress and hat and pumps and stockings. He was sucking on a peppermint stick in the church basement when Big Abel found him.

  Later that night they watched themselves on the teevee news. King was coming. Big Abel wanted to stay and march with King. Antoinette called and told Big Abel to get his ass in the car and get her son home to Nashville or come home whenever he came to an empty house. He got himself and his boy into the car.

  Abel rode all the way back to Nashville thinking about what he had seen in Selma. The people were sad, and they were angry, but some of them were something else. He didn’t know the words for it but he recognized defiant and angry and sure when he saw it.

  Walking across the bridge and hanging back at the church, hearing the folks with the different way of talking talk, the people the others called Yankees, black Yankees and white Yankees, Abel realized, for the very first time, there were people who lived in safe places. He wanted to live in one too.

  He had seen the reporters and seen the photographers. He had met somebody who’d said he was a panther. Some of these people had talked to him. Some of them had even taken his picture. One of them had told him about a place called South Africa. He didn’t know what the man was talking about but he knew he wanted to be like one of the white people from somewhere else who couldn’t believe that places like Selma existed even when they were standing right in them.

  A few days later, the march was attempted again and a few steps were taken but the bridge was not crossed. A few more days after that Martin Luther King went down with a lot of famous people. Wade’s daddy called to tell them all about it. Abel’s daddy called Abel to the phone and told Wade’s daddy to holler for him. It was the first time Abel had ever talked long-distance. Big Abel wanted his boy to remember the victorious day.

  All Abel remembered later was Bloody Sunday and the telephone call from Wade’s daddy and the reporters who hadn’t believed the place where he lived existed.

  Saturday, April 9, 1967. Abel ran right through the door of Craig-head’s Barber Shop and smack into the knees of a man in a dark suit.

  The man grabbed Abel by the sleeve of his new blue and white seersucker Easter suit. Abel was about to be in trouble.

  Bumping into grown folks because you’re rushing to get a Coke from the machine was not the kind of thing his daddy tolerated.

  If the man was old enough Abel might get switched. He didn’t look up to see the man’s face. He didn’t want to know how old the man was. Abel wanted to get his soda before his daddy announced he had lost his privilege.

  “Slow down, son, before you knock somebody over,” said the man.

  Abel’s fortunes changed. He slowed his move toward the Coke machine and happily fingered the coins in his pocket. His daddy hated anybody calling his child “son” worse than he hated his son bumping into grown folks.

  Abel didn’t look back. He didn’t want to see what was about to happen to the man.

  Big Abel could tear a person up with his tongue. Sometimes after his daddy quit cussing and fussing a man would look so crumpled Abel believed the man might have preferred getting whipped with a swi
tch. He knew what was about to be said because he had heard it so many times before.

  “You calling that boy ‘son’ is like you calling my wife a whore. You don’t want to do that. Apologize.”

  Depending on what the man said back the conversation could get ugly quick. This stranger was in trouble.

  And then he wasn’t. Big Abel was saying something and he was stammering as he said it. He said, “If y-y-you want him he’s y-y-yours.” And then he was welcoming the man to town and apologizing for his boy. Big Abel didn’t apologize—for himself or for his children. Abel’s world wobbled.

  The boy turned around to see who the man was that was making his daddy act strange.

  Dr. Martin Luther King. Abel recognized the face immediately. Dr. King’s picture was hung up in his classroom. Dr. King’s face was on six different magazines on the cocktail table in his family’s living room. Dr. King’s likeness was plastered to telephone poles and the sides of buildings and the fronts of buildings all over North Nashville. And Dr. King was standing in Craighead’s Barber Shop at seven on a Saturday morning looking like he had just gotten scalped by Craighead himself.

  Abel blinked to see if Jesus, John Henry, and Muhammad Ali weren’t sitting up in Craighead’s three barber chairs with white towels wrapped around their necks.

  He shook Dr. King’s outstretched hand reluctantly. He could not help but be a little afraid of any man who could make Big Abel stammer.

  Dr. King crouched down to look Abel in the eye.

  “You got your suit on and you getting your hair cut. You coming to hear me speak?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eight. The nuns read us ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ at school this week because you were coming.”

  “Did you understand any of it?”

  “Injustice anywhere hurts justice everywhere?”

  Dr. King patted the boy on the head and looked up at Big Abel. Dr. King was impressed. He stood and shook the father’s hand.

  “T-t-tell him something else you remember, son.”

  “My feets is weary but my soul is at rest!”

  The room erupted in laughter. Even old Craighead, who never laughed and hardly ever talked, laughed. Big Abel lifted his son onto his hip. King kissed the boy on the head, then Big Abel kissed Abel on the cheek. Then Big Abel stood his son on his own two feet and looked at him like he had never seen him before. King reached out to shake the boy’s hand again. This time Abel shook it like a little man.

  Dr. King reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and he pulled out a candy bar. He kissed the boy on the head again, then handed Abel the treat. Apologizing for having to be on his way, he was due on the Vanderbilt campus across town, King was halfway out the door.

  Abel was climbing into one of the three barber chairs. Big Abel was sitting in another. King turned back to speak.

  “You don’t know what that means now, but one day you will. And I predict when that day comes it will be as true for you as it was for that lady. If it’s not, don’t you eat my candy bar.”

  As soon as Dr. King closed the door, Abel unwrapped the candy bar and gobbled it down quick.

  The preacher, the poet, the pol, and the rabble-rouser, Martin Luther King, Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael, and Strom Thurmond, were coming to town. April 9, 1967, the weekend of the Vanderbilt University IMPACT Symposium, was promising to be more exciting than Christmas—and then it was more exciting than Christmas.

  Big Abel’s son, Abel, had been kissed by Dr. King after Abel had quoted, correctly and without prompting, from “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

  For the first time in his grown life Big Abel wanted to go to heaven. He wanted to thank Jesus. Come Monday morning Big Abel was sending the nuns at St. Vincent de Paul, the little black Catholic school, a bright bouquet for preparing his son so well. That story was all over town and for a few hours Abel loved hearing it.

  When he walked out of Craighead’s Barber Shop with his fresh-cut head and Dr. King’s chocolate on his breath, he was the prince of a proud place.

  There is a stone wall around the Fisk campus that guards the students and raises the lawn that connects Jubilee Hall, the chapel, the old library, the Van Vechten collection, and all the original campus above the street. In April 1967, as Abel and his father drove, in a new navy Cadillac that had replaced the Flying Crow, from Craighead’s alongside the wall toward Vanderbilt, Abel thought the stone wall beside him enclosed the most beautiful place in the world.

  Then they stepped onto the grounds of the Vanderbilt campus to hear Dr. King speak. Abel didn’t hear many of Dr. King’s words that day. He was stricken by the realization that the Vanderbilt campus, which he had never seen but had always heard derided in his home and his neighborhood, was, in fact, prettier than Fisk’s campus. The trees were taller and more plentiful. More flowers were planted. He couldn’t say the buildings were more beautiful, but they were bigger and there were more of them. He was profoundly startled. Then the speech was over.

  They tried to shake King’s hand again but there were too many trying to shake it for the first time. Big Abel and Abel dashed back to North Nashville and Fisk; Antoinette was cooking and Stokely Carmichael was giving a talk. Stokely promised to be something bigger and badder than King. Lunch was great. Halfway through Stokely’s talk Big Abel walked out, dragging his son with him.

  He said he could do more to help the race down at his law office, and Abel could do more doing his homework, than either of them could do “listening to that mess.” In the morning Big Abel had thought Strom Thurmond was the rabble-rouser; now he thought Carmichael was a rabble-rouser too.

  Abel was intrigued that a black man and a white man could provoke his father to the exact same kind of rage. He had never seen that before this strange day.

  Later that Saturday night, Big Abel and Antoinette were off to the home of friends for a Circle-lets party. It was rumored King might stop by. Pretty Sonia babysat for Abel and Tess.

  Soon after Abel’s parents left, a war began. This war wasn’t carried on the national television or much noticed even in the rest of Nashville, but two blocks from where Abel lived a battle occurred. Students fought with rocks and sticks and stones and police fought back with bullets. All night long Abel could hear gunshots as he lay in his bed in the dark. By the second evening one black boy, a Tennessee State University student, had been shot in the neck and the chancellor of Vanderbilt University was defending academic freedom. Molotov cocktails were thrown that night through the windows of homes. Abel thought it was the night he and his family were going to die and the black people were going to kill them just like black people had killed Malcolm.

  The next morning Abel’s daddy, who had been bailing students arrested for nonviolent protest out of jail, using his own money— Little Abel’s patrimony— to do it, laid the blame for the mayhem at the mouth of Stokely Carmichael. Nobody was talking about Strom Thurmond anymore. Everybody was talking about Stokely’s speech. And not in a good way. Abel was a most bewildered boy.

  NINE

  HOPE WOKE UP Wednesday morning in the bed she shared with Waycross sick that her week was buried in sorrow and Abel was buried in a white people’s cemetery. Bigger things than that were wrong but none of them was as absolute and for-sure wrong. For better or for worse Abel should have been buried in Arlington. It was the worst kind of spite that Sammie had buried Abel in Alabama.

  Hope pulled the phone, a blah white touch-tone with a hyper-sophisticated caller-ID system, into her bed before even getting up to go to the bathroom. She called Ajay, who wasn’t answering. She called back and texted the obvious: “I love you, precious.”

  She wanted her son to be fine again. Abel’s death had stripped away a layer between the boy and mortality. Anything that made the child feel precarious made Hope feel precarious. She thanked God that Grandma was still alive providing an illusion of buffer, but Grandma was closer to a hundred than ninety. How
long could that last?

  Before she had time to answer the question the phone rang. Caldwell Lyttle was on the line. Republican, Christian, and southern in all the expected and easy-to-deplore ways, he was calling to talk about the will. He was calling so early because he was headed to the airport.

  With mourning settling so prickly into and onto her morning, she found it comforting to hear the voice of someone who understood Christian-soldier Abel and perhaps could help her understand him.

  Lyttle continued to speak, working hard to maintain the appearance of being an aw-shucks modest man (pride is a significant sin in the New South) while conveying the impression that he was a very big deal and it was a very good thing, a right true and Christian thing, that he was extending the shelter of his authority to a raggedy part of Abel’s history.

  “By ‘raggedy part’ he had better only mean me,” Hope thought as soon as Lyttle had let that particular bit of idiocy slip his lips. Only I am raggedy.

  Hope wanted to slap Lyttle, but the phrase had originated with Abel. “My raggedy-ass divorce” was a common phrase of his. She could hear him talking in his fake Negro-speak that so amused him when he was drunk.

  Lyttle mimicking Abel talking black, Lyttle saying, “It’s time I tend to the raggedy parts of Abel’s life,” was, like the old folks say, uglier than homemade sin.

  Lyttle didn’t like Hope. She was not what she once had been—nor what she should be by his lights. Lyttle only knew Hope as she was now: expanded untidily into middle age, and aged to a complexity unsuited to him. At best he thought of her as Abel’s unfinished business; business he, Lyttle, would be honor-able enough to finish. She felt his distaste, but as long as he didn’t project it onto Ajay it was of no concern to her. She liked her raggedy parts.

  It was barely seven but Lyttle started reading bits and pieces of Abel’s will to Hope to illustrate the need for him to get together with Ajay. He was talking about a “bonus round” and about Ajay inheriting the house on Fifteenth Street and all its contents, but Ajay had to live in the house a month a year, and he had to be on a pre-med track. Hope woke up. Lyttle noticed. She started paying attention. He really noticed. The conversation got difficult.