Rebel Yell Read online

After that it had taken him years to find Bob Shropshire, his favorite black Confederate; years to find his sharpshooter, his most effective black Confederate; years more to find his proof that the South would have won if they had only armed their blacks. But the wish for the knowledge had been born that day.

  Later that week his class had visited the Pentagon, and Abel had made up his mind then and there that one day he would work inside the five-sided fortress.

  And when Hope said, at the house on Beacon Hill, that she had seen his black Confederate, that she knew for sure, with certainty, when challenged, backed up by no facts, that his Confederate was a soldier and not a servant, Abel had known that one day he would marry Hope.

  S——— himself had been enchanted. By Hope, and by Abel. By the fact that they all three of them knew the Confederate Memorial. He had known it because he’d known the sculptor, Moses Ezekiel. S——— had added that “piece to the puzzle,” as he would later tell the tale at the wedding.

  That day at lunch S——— had been thinking Abel and Hope might get to their second marriage the first time. To wave them on, S——— had told them tales of his ancestor’s studio in Rome, of parties at his famous house. Parties attended by Moses Ezekiel, Edmonia Lewis, and, most fabulously, Moses’s black daughter, Alice. That was the kicker.

  None of them had forgotten that particular beef Wellington, that potage parisienne, that chocolate mousse, that Sunday lunch in September of 1977.

  “For Christmas I gave Abel an out-of-print copy of Dr. Dan. I wonder if it’s still in his old house,” said Hope.

  “The biography of Alice’s husband? Abel gave it to me, when he married Sammie,” said Nicholas.

  “Why?” asked Hope.

  “He said he was afraid Sammie might destroy anything you had given him,” said Nicholas.

  “That’s why I was always terrified of her spending any time with Ajay,” said Hope.

  “Did he name the second of the girls Alice for Dr. Dan’s wife?” asked Nicholas.

  “Probably,” said Hope.

  “Nicola is named for me,” said Nicholas.

  “I didn’t know that,” said Hope.

  “How long before Abel knew your father was white?” asked Nicholas.

  “A good little while,” said Hope.

  “Why?” asked Nicholas.

  “I was just so newly black. I didn’t want anything to mess it up,” said Hope, looking up.

  “What do you mean ‘newly black’?”

  “My mother died when I was very young. She was black. My father was white. He raised me isolated in coal country. When he died I was taken in by my black great-aunts who lived in D.C.,” said Hope.

  “When did you tell Abel about the rich part?”

  “After the aunts died.”

  “So money was part of why he picked you?”

  “And it was the sin he couldn’t forgive.”

  “Rumor has it you’ve made a tidy profit eco-investing.”

  “I do all right.”

  “The sin he couldn’t forgive wasn’t yours; it was his.”

  “Wealth?”

  “Jealousy.”

  It had been a good little while before Abel had known that Hope’s father had been white, months into their courtship, after they had become lovers.

  She had told him one afternoon when he’d found her in the African-American reading room in Lamont Library crying over Nella Larsen’s Passing.

  “I don’t want to be some ‘tragic mulatto.’ ”

  “I am a tragic mulatto. You are a . . . my . . . Rebel Yeller.”

  She had fallen in love with him precisely, as precisely as he had coined the phrase, at the moment he had coined the phrase. Rebel Yeller.

  Soon after that, they had gone down to Washington for the weekend to see the great-aunts who had raised Hope. He had imagined that her mother had been a well-loved but debauched maid who somehow had obtained a degree of respectability and some funds. He had imagined that Hope had attended St. Paul’s as part of some ABC program. He had felt sorry for her. He had taken her to Arlington and shown her, again, the Confederate Memorial and reminded her of all they knew about Moses Ezekiel and Alice. Abel had feared Hope didn’t believe her white father had loved her.

  He hadn’t been able to imagine anyone not loving Hope. And somehow the fact that he had snatched her from a white man, from her white father, from all the white boys who had had her— at St. Paul’s and at Harvard— before she had fallen in love with him, was unspeakably sweet consolation for losses he would not name.

  Walking together around the Confederate monument, they had first voiced their wish to spend the summer after their junior year together in Rome.

  Two years later, when the wish had come true, he had spent his days preparing to write a thesis on the rise of fascism; she had spent hers rereading Hawthorne’s Marble Faun and retracing the steps of Edmonia Lewis, the black sculptress. And Hope had begun to whittle little pieces.

  Neither Hope nor Abel had got much work done. Instead they had drunk wine, eaten gelato, and walked around the city telling each other the stories they had told no one else.

  He had told her about the Fantastic Four, the four young residents who had lived next door to him when he was a teenager— one from Waycross, Georgia; one from Opelika, Alabama; one from Mount Bayou, Mississippi; and one from Ya-zoo City, Mississippi— all named Daniel Hale. She had told him some about West Virginia— that she had been raised in Harper’s Ferry— and then Washington. She had told him that her father had been some white guy who had disappeared. That she had always been black, had not started sorta being black away in boarding school and then arrived at Harvard just black; that she had never been exiled from the world of Storer College, from the bubble that is the world of historically black colleges, the buildings, the people who attend them, the people who teach in them, and the people who run them.

  And so, ever after, when anyone had said Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, Abel hadn’t thought of a crazy white man, John Brown, or of Heyward Shepherd, the first black casualty of the Civil War. He had thought about what he knew of Hope’s family, of her grandparents Charles and Emmaline, who had taught at Storer, and whom Hope had hardly known but was able to construct quite vividly for Abel; the great-aunts who had raised her in Washington after her parents had died, whom Hope loved dearly with a love she feared Abel wouldn’t share. She had kept their joys to herself.

  He had borrowed a guitar and she had taught him three chords, and they had sat down and written a blues song called “Redboned Woman in a Bluestone House” and a protest song called “Buffalo Creek,” about the mining disaster. He had played lead on his guitar and she had kept the rhythm on her banjo. That was the best work either of them had done that summer, except perhaps for her little whittles.

  When they had put their guitar, their banjo, and their wine bottles down, when they were not walking and looking through the city holding hands, they were urgent and awkward in their search for sex. She kept reaching for his blackness and he kept reaching for her whiteness when he should have been reaching for her breast and she should have been reaching for his penis.

  As Hope and Abel had wandered round S———’s rooms, imagining what Alice, the slave woman’s daughter, had seen or done, and how she had been viewed and treated, they had understood themselves to be among the few or the only who cared that Edmonia Lewis’s Cleopatra was finer than S———’s. Though Edmonia’s sculpture would be lost and forgotten in barrooms and storage rooms, Hope and Abel would love it best, and Hope and Abel were among the few who tried to reconstruct just what might have happened to precipitate young Alice’s return to America from Rome after eighteen months. Even as Hope withheld and left unspoken the story of the dark lady she loved deepest—her own mother, Canary— Hope and Abel would remember the other dark ladies of Rome. And Hope and Abel would imagine what Alice had made of her father being a white Confederate soldier—a Confederate soldier who had cared enough about h
is African daughter to send her to Rome and send her to Howard, or at least that’s how the story went when Abel told it to Hope. Later, after telling her that story, he would serenade her to sleep, singing “My Creole Belle.”

  By the end of the summer they were not living in Rome; they were living in Hope and Abel Land. And they didn’t need their hands to give each other best gifts. He had found her breast and she had found his penis and they had found love.

  Senior year they had both been busy writing, catching up on the work they hadn’t done in Rome. Diploma in hand, he had headed for law school, down to North Carolina and Duke. She, not knowing what she wanted to do, had gone to work for a senator from West Virginia. He’d been surprised she had the connections to grab that plum. They’d broken up.

  High blood pressure had taken the aunts, who had not liked swallowing pills. Stroke had taken one; heart attack had taken the other just days later. Hope had buried them both the same day. She had called Abel and asked him to come to be with her. He hadn’t. The old lovers were no longer friends.

  Eventually, Abel had gone to Washington for a New Year’s party. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Hope had been invited to the same party. They had avoided each other all the night but couldn’t avoid talking when they found themselves alone in the same cold gravel parking lot waiting for the rest of the small group that had hiked the towpath on New Year’s Day. Nor could she avoid him in the way-backseat of a Volvo station wagon, squashed into his lap, on the crushed drive to the downtown hot tubs, Making Waves. In the chlorine-scented darkness their fingers had brushed and he had looked so like her that she had believed she could be swept into a southern family and belong; he had believed he could be swept into all her big-world wildness and get free. They had made a date for the next night.

  He was still broke from Christmas, from trying to trick the only people who knew for sure he was poorer than a church mouse, his mama and his daddy, Antoinette and Big Abel, into believing that small sparkling presents— a money clip and a gold locket— meant prosperity, not lack of sense and a willingness to sell your blood.

  Wanting to treat Hope to a memorable meal, he went round to the fancy grocery store his friends from Washington talked about, Neam’s, and purchased a fancy loaf of bread, wishing he could afford a jar of caviar—wishing that he had saved the best gift for the one who was most dear to him. Abel never did that. He saved his best gifts for whoever needed the most persuading.

  Loaf under his arm, he walked down to Cannons Fish Market and bought a few dollars’ worth of fresh mussels. His hands were no longer empty.

  In a borrowed kitchen, he scrubbed the black shells clean with his toothbrush, then boiled them until they popped open. He threw the steamed mussels into a baggie and wrapped the baggie in tinfoil. Throwing the foil packet into a paper bag with the bread and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, Abel was proud of his feast.

  He waited in a borrowed car in a dark that had arrived so early it could rightly have been accused of having stolen the remains of the day, waited in front of the house she rented with friends who were also working on the Hill, waited until she tapped lightly on the car door.

  He rolled down the window and she kissed his cheek, then twirled that prep-school-girl look-at-me twirl in funny vintage white go-go boots and black tights and a tweed coat. When she turned her face back to his, and he looked into her dark eyes and she looked into his, she saw that he saw she was more beautiful than any other creature on earth; he saw that she saw they were almost exactly alike.

  She tugged at the scarf round his neck, she pulled his face toward hers, and then she kissed him.

  By the time she ran round to her car door, he could hardly breathe. He wished he had brought his asthma inhaler. But he didn’t tell her that. He told her where they were going. She told him to stop the car. She ran back into her house. When she came out again she was wearing a black mink coat. She looked like the most magnificent bear.

  Some snow was on the ground when they walked into Rock Creek Cemetery. In the shadow of the monument (called by locals Grief, called by its creator, Saint-Gaudens, The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God That Passeth Understanding) that Henry Adams had placed on the grave of his photographer-socialite wife, who had committed suicide by drinking photographic developing chemicals, Abel asked Hope to marry him just after he came in her mouth and she swallowed.

  She should have run. In years to come, she would wonder why she hadn’t. When she recalled the scene to the front of her mind to reimagine it, he was left alone, her mother’s black mink coat on the ground and her footprints, tiny size-six boots, marking the dark path of her escape.

  But that wasn’t what she had done. It had been so strange him walking her into that cemetery, so muddled his wanting to show her that monument, so real all the statues they had seen, that she had just had to reach for his scarf again, pull his face to hers again, take him by the hand, take off her coat, lay it like a blanket on the ground, take his hand and put it on her breast, then rock him like her back had no bone.

  She had liked the view she had had of the stars when she’d been lying on her back looking up with him on top of her. On top of her he had liked the smell of the earth.

  They had thought they could cheat death. She had been so hungry for everything he had wanted to escape and so she had invited it all in—all his junk and all his beauty. He had never before felt and would never again feel so welcome. Not even the afternoon in Baguio, in the shower after tennis, in the hills of the Philippines, when they had made Ajay.

  TWELVE

  HE GRADUATED LAW school in May of 1984. “We were engaged in July. One September later we were married,” said Hope.

  “He once told me freedom had a specific flavor,” said Nicholas.

  “What did he say it tasted like?” asked Hope.

  “Mrs. Abel Jones,” said Nicholas.

  “Was he talking about me or Sammie?” asked Hope.

  “Don’t be a bitch. Where was the wedding?” asked Nicholas.

  “St. John’s Lafayette Square,” said Hope.

  “Church of Presidents,” said Nicholas.

  “Where but,” said Hope.

  Abel and Hope had been married at St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square, an eighteenth-century gold-domed Episcopal church just across from the White House. Thurgood Marshall, a close friend of Abel’s family, had attended the service and later had sent a Waterford pitcher to decorate the new home.

  She had told Abel that she was rich and they had had the harder conversation about wills and trusts, which meant he wasn’t rich but their children would be. He hadn’t seemed to mind.

  Some of Hope’s friends from St. Paul’s had come, and a very few of her father’s friends from Exeter. There’d been a divided phalanx of Harvard folk—his Finals Club people and her Institute of Politics and Crimson buddies. And her cousin Hat from up on the mountain had come to walk her down the aisle. Gordon Lyle, one of her father’s Exeter buddies and an old China hand who had begun his career in Hong Kong when Vietnam had been the problem of the day, had dashed over from the White House on a bicycle.

  Lyle’s wife had sent a little blue and white teapot decorated with Chinese characters, as if she’d known the young couple would soon be headed for Asia, but there wasn’t a way for them to know that already, or at least there wasn’t a way of which Hope had been aware on that day.

  Their gift had been an interesting departure from the mounting collection of large and dramatic silver-plated trays, which would have constituted decorative bric-a-brac for most young couples but which Hope would put to hard and regular use in Abel’s new world.

  The senior senator from West Virginia, Hope’s about-to-be-former boss, had broken from the pack and sent a porcelain cake plate that had looked too fragile for the life Abel and Hope had been headed into. Like Hope, the plate would make it across the world and back, little worse for visible wear, but there would be a crack.

  The near-ancient black Baptist mi
nister who had married Abel’s parents and the young black Episcopal priest whom Hope and Abel knew from Harvard and who had prepared Abel and Hope for marriage had flanked the unflappable Reverend Harper, who had given no indication, as he had gone about the Lord’s work, that the 1815 edifice was not daily inhabited by a tribe of southern black poets, politicos, and preachers.

  With a former ambassador, a White House aide, a Supreme Court justice, and a senator studding the crowd of professors, preachers, doctors, and lawyers, more than one of the brilliant and brown of the dearly beloved filling the pews (forming, for this day, a predominantly black but integrated congregation) had been shouting inside their head the words to an old cigarette commercial, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

  One dowager dragon had whispered, behind her perfectly manicured espresso-colored hand, into the beige ear of the young matron beside her, all the while keeping her amber eyes turned toward the crew of clerics waiting at the altar. She had stated plainly, if quietly, “It’s not Abel and Hope getting married, it’s our South to their America.”

  When the first chords of Vivaldi’s “Trumpet Voluntary” had sounded, everybody had stood to welcome the bride. Cousin Hat, sober and trembling in a new blue suit, and perceived by many to be a light-skinned black man, had given Hope away.

  After the service, which had begun as the last bell of noon had rung and had ended before the strike of one, the guests had been herded onto rented yellow school buses that would carry them to the reception. Everyone had got the joke.

  Thrown together on the black vinyl seats, everybody had talked with everybody, the people from Washington hearing how it was in the hinterlands; the people from the hinterlands hearing what was about to come down from Washington; everyone agreeing they had done their share of good work—that the young couple was proof. It had been a good day.