Massive. That was how the doctors described his heart attack.
“Child, please believe me, there was nothing you could have done,” implored their mother. “Doctor said he died before he hit the ground.”
But Ella was inconsolable. She wept and wept, sobbing for hours at a time. “I left him alone,” she kept saying. “If I had been there, I could’ve saved him. People survive heart attacks. He died because I wasn’t there.”
Baby’s Breath won. First place. The racetrack owner dedicated the evening’s races to “Samson Mackenzie, a trailblazing black man with a golden touch.” It was heart wrenching. His family stood in the winner’s circle, had their picture taken with the owner, the jockey, and Baby’s Breath. The race paid a nice purse—Samson had set up a bet on the horse himself—but that didn’t offer much consolation.
“Why didn’t I know CPR?” Ella lamented during the ride home that evening. No one spoke as her agonized sobs filled the car. “I could’ve saved him. I could have.”
Angie thought that she’d die herself from a heart attack, that’s how much her chest hurt. And she couldn’t help thinking that Ella had asked God the wrong favor.
FOUR
After he died, Ella gave up the horses, refusing to go anywhere near the racetrack. In those early weeks, she wouldn’t eat and lost the very weight her father had chastised her for, that and more. She looked gaunt, sickly, too little flesh hanging onto her big-boned frame. She couldn’t sleep, so Dr. Benjamin prescribed modest milligrams of Valium, which their mother initially had to force her to take. In those first weeks, Angie felt like an asthmatic, unable to catch her breath. She believed the oxygen they needed to breathe was sealed off behind Ella’s closed bedroom door. Only in her absence did Angie understand what Ella’s presence had brought to the household. Now she wasn’t there to enliven dinner conversations with captivating stories about what Butterscotch or Whisper or Baby’s Breath had done at the track that day, antics that Angie was thrilled to hear, even though she’d been right beside her when they happened. Ella was the one who gave her sisters IQ tests for fun, who showed them how to play elaborate card games with silly names—bid whist, hearts, gin rummy—who spoke French and quoted Freud and blasted classical music by black composers on the hi-fi. And Ella was the one who taught them all, their mother included, a Buddhist chant she’d discovered somewhere, Nam myoho renge kyo. “Say the words over and over when you can’t find something or you’re messed up over some situation or just plain scared, and you’ll get really calm,” Ella had promised. “Suddenly your mind will reveal a solution. It works like magic.” They all tried it out: their mother when she misplaced her keys, Denise when she wanted a certain boy to ask her to the junior high dance, even Angie when she wanted to be chosen as a table captain at school; they decided yes, she was right, it worked.
Angie was six, old enough to feel the deep loss of Ella’s dramatic infusions. She understood that now they weren’t special anymore—just another average family on the block, like any other black family. No more magic. And their father was dead.
Angela Davis’s trial is what finally brought Ella out of her room. The previous fall, their father had given Ella the “Free Angela” button, and she’d worn it pinned to her navy peacoat throughout winter and into spring. Samson had gotten it from one of the Nation of Islam men who stood outside Temple No. 1 on Linwood Avenue selling bean pies and copies of Elijah Speaks. “That girl reminds me of you,” he told Ella. “Smart as a whip, putting her mind to something and sticking with it, even when she’s up against hell and high water. Brave.”
Ella was, like everyone, transfixed by images of the pretty, gap-toothed black girl with the big Afro, this intellectual radical who’d been on the lam, made the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Ella followed the trial closely for weeks, watching the news coverage every night on the floor-model TV in the living room. She was transfixed. But Ella’s obsession clearly frightened their mother. “All that book sense didn’t stop that girl from buying a gun to help some thug kill a judge,” she said, standing in front of the TV. Ella ignored her. Through it all, Angie thought it was wrong, simply insane that she was named Angela, that she’d been given that name instead of her big sister. She felt her mother had gotten it wrong.
When Angela Davis was acquitted that June, Ella went straight to the Shrine of the Black Madonna’s bookstore on Livernois Avenue, where they held a celebration party. She bought a copy of Davis’s book, If They Come in the Morning, and read it in two days. After that, Ella was at the Shrine weekly, buying books recommended by Sharif, the owner, hanging around, getting schooled as he called it. She read the work of Frantz Fanon and Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X, listened to a recording of Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 speech on Black Power in Detroit, and by the end of that summer had abandoned the straightening comb, was wearing a natural that framed her face like a hair bonnet. Nanette, as a newly widowed mother of three girls, was just old enough to be frightened by the Black Power movement. “I see smart young men and women, whose parents sacrificed mightily, letting themselves get swept up in something lawless,” she said to Ella. “And my years in the South have taught me they can’t win,” she added, “Because the white man has all the resources on his side. All of them.”
Meanwhile, Angie thought her big sister was an Afro goddess.
Ella wasn’t a radical who proselytized. Nor did she attend the big Black Power rallies held downtown. She was too shy, too self-conscious for that. But she did share more and more observations with her family. “Ever think about everything Daddy went through because of the Man?” she’d say. “How many years he worked his way up before they gave him a chance to train? The stress he was under every day?” Mostly she kept her head buried in Sharif’s books, sometimes bringing them with her to the dinner table, oversized glasses perched on her small nose as she ignored the food in front of her.
Mimicking her sister, Angie also turned to books in those early weeks after their father’s death. At first, she was content with picture books and Dr. Seuss. But then she found Black Beauty on Ella’s bedroom shelf, was drawn to the cover image of a beautiful ebony-colored horse. She asked Ella to read the story to her, but Ella said she was too busy; she asked Denise next, who said OK; Angie relished in the descriptions, conjuring the smells and sounds and tastes of the stables, of her father, of an accumulated loss so acute it would take years to unpack. That summer, Denise walked her again and again to the local library, where they checked out one pony book after another. Denise dutifully read them all to Angie, as they lay in their room, fan whirring, each lying across her own twin bed. “Where are the little black girls riding ponies?” Ella said one hot July day, as she passed by her sisters reading together on the living room sofa, cooled by the air conditioner. “Ignore Miss Militant,” said Denise. After that, Angie still loved the pony stories but found herself nagged by the blond and raven and red-haired girls at the center of them all.
Eventually, Ella regained her appetite. She developed an obsessive love for Red Barn’s chicken. Her favorite snacks were Ding Dongs and Lay’s potato chips. She took to eating meals in her room, a book in one hand, fork or chicken thigh or chip in the other. Their mother made Ella’s favorite desserts—banana pudding and ambrosia salad. And she sometimes bought Awrey’s Boston cream pie, most of which Ella managed to eat. Nanette noticed Ella’s overeating, but said nothing, acutely aware that while they all grieved for Samson, Ella naturally grieved the hardest. Food was a comfort. Why take that from her? When their mother heard Denise call Ella “a fat ass,” she lashed out at her. “Who are you to talk?” she snapped. “You’re no Twiggy, and never will be.” After that Denise, and everyone else, knew to say nothing about Ella’s weight gain.
Thinking about it now, Angie couldn’t remember Ella when she was slim, only the vague outline of her that day she swallowed those pills. But she cherished the black and white photographs of Ella from her years in Nashville.
In one, Ella sits at a toy piano, poised, hands on keys, smiling softly at the camera. In another, she stands erect, a pocketbook in the crook of her arm. Both were taken the same day, Ella dressed in the same Easter Sunday outfit. She is a thin girl, bright eyes looking out from a sepia-toned universe. Angie couldn’t believe this was her sister before she herself was born, that Ella had once lived in a different guise, in a different place, oblivious to Angie’s eventual existence.
About a year after their father’s death, when Ella was a high school senior, Sharif gave her Huey P. Newton’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide. She devoured it, and was so moved by the inspired radicalism that soon after she joined Sharif at the Masonic Temple for her first political rally. They saw the firebrand political activist Coleman Young speak. His rough-side eloquence moved her as he spoke of his bid to be Detroit’s first black mayor, and the need to rid the city of its police brutality, as well as its “murder capital of the world” moniker.
Days later, their mother caught Ella smoking in her room, and confronted her. “What are you doing? You could get hooked!” she warned.
“I can stop whenever I want,” said Ella.
“You don’t know what you can or can’t stop until it’s too late,” their mother snapped back. “And you’re not grown yet. I don’t want you smoking, you hear me?”
“Save your breath, Mama,” said Ella. “’Cause I’m gonna do it behind your back no matter what you say. That’s just what’s happening.”
Their mother’s face showed the alarm, showed how hard it was to be alone in all this, no husband as backup. “Who the hell do you think you are?” she said, but the words had little force behind them.
They compromised. Ella promised to only smoke light cigarettes, which, according to the ads, were safer. And never inside the house.
Ella left for U of M the fall of 1974, just two weeks after Nixon resigned, the nation’s sense of betrayal dominating the news and Angie’s dreams. She watched as Ella packed a footlocker of clothes and toiletries, and felt tinges of betrayal, as though someone had lied to her, hadn’t told the whole story of what it means when a sister goes off to college. On the drive up, her mother was wistful, said she’d longed to attend Vanderbilt University, but had to give up that dream when she became a young wife and mother. Throughout the drive, Ella said little, in fact spent most of the trip with her head buried in a paperback edition of Helter Skelter, its creepy cover and splashed-on letters disturbing to eight-year-old Angie. That first semester, Angie visited Ella on campus, and was awed by the size and expanse of the university. Meanwhile, their mother was relieved to have her oldest daughter out of Detroit. “Black mayor or not, this city is out of control,” she said. “You never know which way harm’s coming.” Angie decided that she too would one day go to the same big university in the town with the movie-star name: Ann Arbor.
Ella came home on visits saying how white students had called her a “quota baby” to her face, how they made comments in class about “some people being here just because they’re black,” and how her white roommate in the residence hall demanded she be given another room. Their mother said, “Stay focused on why you’re there.” But Ella clearly felt isolated, and the object of seething resentment. She found solace by joining the Black Student Union and often hung out on the lumpy sofas of the Center for Afro-American and Africa Studies’ windowless office.
At the end of freshman year, Ella announced that she’d be majoring in black studies. “What the hell kinda major is that?” asked their mother. “You think I’m sending you to college to learn how to be black? I’m sending you there to learn something you don’t know, something that’ll help you out here in this white man’s world. Black studies my ass!” And when that didn’t work, her mother pulled out her trump card, “Your father would never have wanted you to do something like that. He did not believe in black for black’s sake. You’re a human being first. Race comes second. That was how he lived his life.”
But even mention of her father didn’t work. Ella had made up her mind; for the next three years she came home on weekends and holidays filled with newfound knowledge about black Africa and its shackles of colonialism, about all the contributions of Afro-Americans to society from “day one,” and the real deal, as she called it, about slavery. Her sophomore year, Ella participated in a sit-in at the administrative building, protesting the university’s paltry 7 percent black-student enrollment. She told her family of a three-day protest where students slept on the stone steps, refusing to leave. When the Soweto Uprising took place, Ella wrote the position paper for the University’s Black Action Movement, insisting that U of M “had an obligation to divest from South Africa, where nearly two hundred students were killed simply for protesting the forced use of Afrikaans in their schools.”
Angie found it all a bit frightening and beyond her understanding, but she loved Ella’s passion, how wise she sounded, puffing her light cigarettes, bright eyes behind owl glasses, speaking through blown smoke with stark tidbits of knowing.
FIVE
On Fridays, Angie worked the morning shift at the store. She and her mother always had breakfast together at the Original House of Pancakes, a TGIF treat, as her mother called it. Dr. Benjamin’s office was on Ewald Circle on Detroit’s west side, in an undulating modern structure of glass block and creamy brick. Still, they ate near Northland Mall in Southfield so Angie wouldn’t be late for work.
She watched her mother pour heavy cream into her coffee, stir it slowly, and noticed her mother’s hands absent of jewelry.
“Where’s your wedding band?” she asked.
Nanette looked up, clearly startled by the question. She stirred her coffee. “I put it away.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s been fifteen years since your father died, that’s why.”
“I mean, why all of a sudden?”
“It’s not all of a sudden, Angela. There’s nothing sudden about it.”
The two sat through an awkward pause as Angie poured syrup on her pancakes.
“So, what are you planning for the summer?” her mother asked.
“Why, do you need me to get out of the way or something?” snapped Angie.
“What kind of question is that?”
“Denise basically said as much to me yesterday.”
Her mother sighed. “She’s just trying to help. She’s a little worried about you, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“Don’t get defensive, please. Because if you do, then we don’t have to talk about it.”
“I won’t get defensive.”
Her mother hesitated. “She just feels, well honestly, we both feel that you seem like you’re…drifting.”
“Drifting? I just fucking graduated like two minutes ago!”
“Don’t curse. You know I don’t like it when you curse.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, really. Drifting?”
“I’d like to see you . . .” Her mother searched for the right word. “Excited about something, that’s all. Not just working at that crazy store every day. You’ve got your psychology degree now. Maybe you want to get a master’s. Or—”
“What’s crazy about the store?”
“Nothing, Angela. I didn’t mean anything by it, OK?”
“Yes you did.”
“No I didn’t. I shouldn’t have said that.” Her mother sighed. “Let’s just eat our breakfast, how about that?”
Angie stabbed at a pancake. “Turns out, I do have a plan for the summer.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m going to travel.”
“You are? Well, that’s something!” Her mother smiled at her. “I think it’ll be good for you to get away.”
It bothered Angie that her mother was so pleased. She just nodded.
“So where? Brazil?”
&
nbsp; “No.”
Her mother eyed her. “Europe?”
Angie shook her head.
“Where?”
“Don’t get upset, OK?”
Her mother put her fork down. “Do not tell me you’re planning to go there.”
Angie nodded.
“Why? Of all the places in the world Angela, why?”
Angie shrugged. Suddenly she couldn’t explain it, now that her mother sat across from her. “It’s where I want to go.”
Her mother pushed her plate away. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not.”
“Nothing is going to happen to me, Mama. I’ll be very careful.”
“It’s not just that. It’s a god-awful place, and Lord knows a lot could happen to you, but it’s not just that.”
“What is it then?”
Her mother leaned across the table. “There’s nothing there for you to find. Believe me.”
“I’m not looking for anything,” Angie insisted. “I’ve always wanted to see it, ever since she came back the first time, talking about it.”
Her mother sat back, folded her arms. “You want to do everything she did.”
Angie looked out the picture window, watched as cars pulled into the parking lot. “That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
She turned her gaze back to her mother. “Have I tried to do drugs?”
The words hung between them, echoing back and forth. Angie regretted them but it was too late.
“No, thank God, you haven’t done that,” said her mother. “And I’m not accusing you of anything, it’s just—”
Into the Go Slow Page 6
