Till You Hear From Me: A Novel

by Pearl Cleage

  A look of relief and something else crossed Stan’s face. Probably shame, Wes thought. Stan’s definition of being a “winner” did not include having to ask a black man for a favor.

  “I would appreciate that, Wes,” Stan said, knowing there was still one more embarrassing question he had to ask.

  “No problem,” Wes said. “Is Truman Jarrett still running the shop over there in admissions?”

  Stan nodded. “I’ll have my girl send the address over.”

  Wes smiled. “No need to. I think I still remember it.”

  At the door he saw Oscar glance in their direction. It was time to go, but he had to ask.

  “Do I need to …”

  Wes looked as if he had no idea what was coming next, although of course he did.

  Stan bit the bullet. “Do I need to send over his transcripts?”

  And here was the wonderful moment when a favor becomes a secret shared, Wes thought. In his world, that was as good as money in the bank. Or in a plain white envelope.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said and lowered his voice conspiratorially even though Toni had engaged Oscar’s attention in the hallway and there was no danger of being overheard. “I know what to say.”

  Stan’s gratitude was almost palpable. “Then you’re my man,” he said, extending his hand one more time, smiling his first real smile of the day, and heading for the door. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Well, Mr. Mystery Money, that’s one more thing you’re wrong about, Wes thought, watching Stan and Oscar follow Toni out into the hallway and back through the unnecessarily confusing exit path he’d created for their benefit. I’m nobody’s man but my own.

  SEVEN

  Fast-Talking Chicago Negroes

  CATNAP, MY ASS. I WAS SOUND ASLEEP WHEN THE FRONT DOORBELL WOKE me up with a start. I use the word “bell” loosely. What the Rev has is a door siren that makes an amazingly unpleasant, impossibly loud sound, that can best be described as a cross between an old-fashioned alarm clock and a fire engine. We have all begged him to replace it with some chimes, or even a less insistent buzzer, but so far, he hasn’t gotten around to it.

  All that was, of course, beside the point. The question was why was he ringing his own doorbell at one thirty on a Sunday afternoon? The answer is, he wasn’t. When I went down and opened the front door, Miss Iona was standing there, all alone, beaming and wearing a beautiful dark green coat, a matching hat that clung to her salt-and-pepper bob at an impossibly sassy and undeniably stylish angle, and a pair of beautiful suede heels, also dark green, that clicked softly on the hardwood floor when she stepped in and threw her arms around me. Miss Iona was a power hugger. She grabbed you fast, squeezed you hard, and then stepped back to extend the appropriate greeting.

  “Welcome home, darlin’,” she said. “Tell me I didn’t wake you up at this hour of the day!”

  “No, I was just …” Of course she didn’t wait for an answer. She took off her coat and dropped it on the coatrack, revealing a dress of the same dark green wool. This was clearly one of Miss Iona’s famous churchgoing ensembles. She liked everything to match and on this day, she had achieved her goal and topped it all off with the gravity-defying hat.

  “The Rev’s on his way to Madison,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Black History Month waits for no man! Eddie’s driving him, of course, so I’m charged with being the official greeter and with getting you over to my house in time for supper. That way you can see everybody at one time and the Rev will have to be on his best behavior because we’ll all be there watching him.”

  I wondered briefly what the Rev would look like on his best behavior, but when I opened my mouth to respond, a big yawn came out instead.

  Miss Iona raised her eyebrows. “I did wake you up, didn’t I?”

  “I was up late,” I said. “Sorry!”

  Her eyes twinkled at me and she lowered her voice. “Anything you can talk about?”

  “Nothing like that,” I said quickly, wishing I had never uttered the words “White House” to Miss Iona or anybody else. “Just some freelance work to hold body and soul together.”

  She looked disappointed, but regrouped fast. “Well, go on upstairs and throw some cold water on your face or something and I’ll make a pot of coffee. Can’t have you yawning at my guests.”

  “How many people are coming?” I said, heading for the stairs and wondering if a public reunion was the best way to go to bring out the best in what was probably going to be a fairly awkward moment, no matter how well Miss Iona had been able to smooth the way.

  “Just the usual suspects,” she said. “My Charlie, of course.”

  She always referred to her husband as my Charlie in a tone that was equal parts affection and ownership. He loved it.

  “Flora and Hank Lumumba, if he’s in town. He’s traveling all the time now. Doing something mysterious. Politics or something. I hope they’ll bring their daughter, Lu. She’s going to Georgetown in the fall, so you should know her anyway. Abbie and Peachy were here from Tybee for the weekend, so they’re coming by before they head back to the island. Probably Blue and Regina Hamilton, you remember them, right?”

  Blue Hamilton was a former R&B singer who had been West End’s unofficial godfather for the past ten years or so. He was the reason West End was always a peaceful oasis, no matter what went on beyond its twenty or so square block borders. I was already away at school when the neighborhood got hit bad with the crack epidemic and a sudden rise in unemployment and homelessness. Women were being robbed and raped like it was a sport. When a member of Blue’s band had a sister assaulted and murdered on her way home from the grocery store, Blue decided something had to be done. He organized the men in the neighborhood, guaranteed the safety of the women, and required the children to have respect for their elders and a sense of responsibility for their futures.

  I had met him and his wife, Regina, a couple of times and been struck by their obvious affection for each other. They are one of those couples who always seem to prefer each other’s company no matter how many other people are around. The rumor is that they knew each other in a past life, but how can you prove something like that? Of course, West End is full of visionaries, clairvoyants, and prophets of all kinds, so there’s no reason to doubt it either.

  “I remember them,” I said.

  “And of course your father and Eddie when they get back from Madison.” She shook her head with a rare show of impatience. The smooth brown feather on her green felt hat trembled delicately. “Isn’t that just like a man? The gathering is in his honor in the first place and he’s going to be the main one walking in late.”

  “In the Rev’s honor?”

  “No, Mr. Eddie, but you know he won’t let anybody else drive your dad, so what are you gonna do?”

  This was a classic case of Iona overload. I hadn’t even had a chance to ask her how the Rev reacted when she told him I was coming and we had already moved on to one of the Sunday gatherings for which she was rightfully famous. Sometimes she and Mr. Charles cooked everything themselves. Sometimes it was potluck, but even then, Mr. Charles always cooked a ham or a big turkey and Miss Iona always made a big pan of mac and cheese to start things off.

  “What I’m going to do,” I said, “is take your suggestion, go splash some water on my face and then come back down here for a cup of that coffee you promised me before you thrust me right back into the never-ending West End social whirl without some caffeine to fortify me.”

  She laughed. “You talk more like your father every day!”

  Hoping that wasn’t true, I hurried back upstairs to wash my face, brush my teeth, and run a comb through my hair. I have always been a low-maintenance girl and being on the road for almost two years straight required that I learn to go from jumping in the shower to walking out the front door in fifteen minutes flat, and I got good at it.

  The Rev hates that I wear my hair so short. He’s definitely of the women’s hair as crowning glory school, but I t
hink it’s really because I look more like my mom this way. One of the worst arguments I ever heard between my parents was when she cut her shoulder-length pageboy into a curly cap of natural ringlets. He accused her of doing it to spite him. She accused him of being a male chauvinist pig and it went downhill from there.

  As I straightened the neckline of my dress, I realized I hadn’t even taken off my pearls when I lay down. They were part of my protective campaign coloration and now they’re just a habit, I guess. I met lots of new people every day when I was on the road and it was my job to make them comfortable with our candidate. Some of them had heard really scary things about Barack, but nobody’s afraid of a smiling woman with a strand of pearls around her neck. Ask the first lady.

  Before heading back downstairs, I examined my reflection for obvious signs of stress and saw looking back at me what appeared to be an attractive, confident woman. The contrast between how I looked and how I felt was so stark, it actually made me smile. Who is that serene-looking bitch? I thought, remembering Richard Pryor’s famous line during his divorce proceedings when his wife showed up looking like a sixteen-year-old virgin instead of his willing partner in crimes too numerous to detail here.

  The funny part is the woman in the mirror looking back at me seemed to be totally on top of things; cool, calm, and collected. Maybe I’m more in control than I think and just maybe Miss Iona’s right about surrounding the Rev with a crowd to bring out the best in him. He’s good at crowds. It’s the one-on-one that makes him crazy. Me, too.

  Thankfully, the smell of freshly brewed coffee floated up the stairs before I could head down that road, so I slipped on my shoes and joined Miss Iona in the kitchen.

  “Can I help you?”

  It was a purely rhetorical question. Miss Iona was bustling around efficiently, her amazing little hat still in place on top of her salt-and-pepper hair, her suede high heels clicking daintily on the tile floor. To paraphrase Gloria Steinem, she needed my help like a fish needs a bicycle.

  “I’ve got it under control,” she said. “Sit down, sit down. How’s your mother doing? Still stirring up trouble on the West Coast?”

  “Every chance she gets,” I said, taking a seat at the table where I had eaten countless bowls of Cheerios, innumerable platters of fried chicken. “She just led a demonstration against her new department chair and they’ve been friends for fifteen years.”

  Miss Iona laughed. “I knew they shouldn’t have given her that tenure. I told you she was going to run amok out there!”

  Miss Iona was only a few years older than my mom, but she had remained untouched by the rush of the Women’s Movement that swept my mother along in a torrent of revolutionary fervor, redefining her life and her tribe and finally giving her the strength to override the Rev’s shocked disapproval and leave him so she could focus her considerable energies on becoming a fully liberated woman, which she did, although last time I checked, neither one of them had filed for divorce.

  On the other hand, Miss Iona seemed never to have imagined herself anything other than completely free. She was the first woman I knew who always had her own money, who never had children, who didn’t marry for the first time until most of her friends were already widows, bought a house at thirty, paid it off at forty, and never asked any man any of us had ever seen for permission to do anything. My mother’s defiance was amusing to Miss Iona.

  “Defiance means you got somebody with power over you,” she said once after listening to my mother speaking at a pro-choice rally. Miss Iona wasn’t much on demonstrations, but she’d come along to look out for me while my mom was doing her thing. “If that’s the case, you don’t need to be defiant, you need to be gone.”

  “What about the women who can’t go?” my mother would say, but Miss Iona couldn’t even wrap her mind around that whole idea.

  “Can’t go?” she’d say. “Who’s holding them?”

  “It’s complicated,” my mom would say.

  “Seems pretty simple to me,” Miss Iona would say gently but firmly, like she didn’t want my mother to be insulted, but was unwilling to feign agreement just to keep the conversation moving along in whatever was my mom’s current direction. “Either you’re free or you’re not.”

  And my mom would give me that She’s wrong, I’m right, I’ll explain later look and smile at Miss Iona, who smiled back, just like she was doing now.

  “Your mother always took everything so seriously,” Miss Iona said.

  “She still does,” I said, wondering why she was taking so long to get to the heart of the matter: what the Rev said when she told him I was coming.

  “Old folks don’t change,” she said, “except to get more like they already are.”

  “Amen to that,” I said, as she poured us two steaming cups of coffee and then went to the refrigerator for cream, to the small cabinet over the sink for the sugar bowl, and then back to the silverware drawer for two spoons.

  “So,” I said when she finally stopped bustling around and sat down across from me, still without removing her beautiful hat. “What did the Rev say when you told him I was coming?”

  Miss Iona raised her cup to her lips and blew delicately. That’s when I knew. I groaned loudly and involuntarily.

  “Oh, Lord, please tell me he knows I’m coming!”

  “Don’t blaspheme,” she said. “I think he suspects. You know how hard it is to slip anything past the Rev.”

  “He suspects?” I set down my cup harder than I meant to and stood up. My first inclination was to dash upstairs, grab my stuff, and run for my life. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Now calm down, Ida B, before you break up your mother’s wedding china and the Rev demands both our heads on a platter. I tried to tell him, but I couldn’t find the right moment. Everything has been so hectic with the beginning to Black History Month. He’s speaking all over the state, not to mention half the pulpits in Atlanta. They all booked him before he lost his mind, of course, but I don’t think they even care. As far as these Negroes are concerned, the Rev can do no wrong.”

  The Rev’s waning popularity among the people who were running things didn’t translate into smaller crowds among the people upon whom he had always counted. He could still draw a crowd in every town in Georgia just by showing up.

  “This was not our deal,” I said, refusing to be distracted by the Rev’s busy schedule. “You promised me.”

  “I know I did,” she said, reaching up now to remove the little hat and place it carefully on the table beside her. “And I meant to do it, you know I did …”

  Her voice trailed off and then she looked up at me suddenly with a bright smile. “But you’re here now, aren’t you? And you know once he sees you, all will be forgiven.”

  “I haven’t done anything to be forgiven for,” I said. “He’s the one who needs to say he’s sorry.”

  She looked disappointed. “He’s still your father, Ida B. Don’t you think he deserves that respect?”

  How had we gone from her not keeping up her end of our bargain to my alleged lack of respect for the Rev? My head was throbbing again.

  “That’s not fair,” I said, “and you know it. He can’t keep going back and forth between being my father and being a hotshot Civil Rights leader.”

  “He has no choice,” she said, shrugging her shoulders gracefully. “He’s always both. Always has been. Always will be.”

  This conversation was going nowhere. I sat back down across from her, suddenly feeling exhausted and grumpy. I needed a hot shower and a hot meal.

  “So now what?” I said, wondering what were the chances I’d get either one anytime soon.

  “Calm down,” she said again. “Don’t I always have a plan?”

  “Okay, let’s hear it,” I said, picking up my coffee and suddenly wishing she’d put some brandy in it.

  “Like I told you, I’m having a little something tonight at my house in Eddie’s honor,” Miss Iona said. “His garden over at Washington High just won
a big award. You should see what he’s done with those kids. Tomatoes you wouldn’t believe!”

  “Go on,” I said, stopping her before she got too far off the track.

  She frowned as if she didn’t understand what I was still concerned about. “That’s it. Soon as they get back from Madison, Eddie will bring the Rev right over.”

  “And then what?” I could hear the stress rising in my voice. What happened to that serene girl in the mirror? Probably gone back to bed like she had some sense.

  “Then I’ll say …” She put on a big happy smile. “‘Surprise, Rev! Look who’s here!’ And then you step up and say, ‘I love you, Daddy! I have missed you so much and no crowd of fast-talking Chicago Negroes should ever come between us again!’ Then hug his neck and I swear to you he’ll be the happiest man in West End.”

  The scene was straight out of a Tyler Perry movie, but real life is always a little more complicated.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Girl, please,” she said. “He’s already so proud of you he’s about to bust. It’s that ego that wouldn’t let him call you.”

  Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I knew they were about to. “Proud of me for what?”

  “Your new position at the right hand of you know who,” she said, and actually winked. “He may have issues with Obama, but he’s been bragging on you all over town.”

  I wondered if it was too late to get on a flight out of here this afternoon. “You told him I was going to work at the White House?”

  “Guilty as charged,” she said cheerfully. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but it was just too good to hold. We’re all so proud of you.”

  My heart sank ever lower, if that was possible. “All? Who else knows?”

  “Well,” she said, “I had to tell my Charlie. You know that. And Eddie was there when I told your dad and I don’t know who all he’s told.”

  I stood up again and walked over to the window. I couldn’t look her in the eye.