Till You Hear From Me: A Novel

by Pearl Cleage

  Wes laughed. “The best! No contest. The absolute best.”

  “Make it plain,” the Rev said. “Make it plain.”

  The truth was, Wes had shadowed the man all day and he wasn’t lying: The Rev was a pro. He started the day at a prayer breakfast, met with a group of community activists who were mad at the mayor, spoke at a high school Black History Month assembly, had lunch with that same mayor, where he shared the activists’ concerns and got a promise from the man to look into the matter and report back, then spoke at a dinner where he received a proclamation declaring it Rev. Horace A. Dunbar Day in Macon, in honor of his role in securing full citizenship rights for African Americans “across Georgia and throughout the world.”

  Wes smiled when he read that as he stood by, holding the framed parchment while the Rev did one final interview with a reporter from the local paper whose tape recorder seemed to need a charge. Throughout the world.

  “So what now, Rev? Black History Month will be over in a couple of weeks. You going to kick back a little?”

  “No time for that,” the Rev said. “According to Charlie Larson, every month is now Black History Month, so I guess I’ll have to just keep doing what I’m doing.”

  “More registration drives?”

  The Rev nodded. “We’ve got a lot of momentum and I don’t want to lose it. That’s why I’m all over the state trying to keep those little churches activated and energized.”

  Wes’s brain immediately reimagined that as a campaign slogan: Vote for our guy! He’s activated and energized!

  “It is my intention to register another fifty thousand voters before the midterm elections.”

  Wes could imagine how happy that would make Oscar. One hundred fifty thousand new voters to disenfranchise. The man might actually swoon with joy.

  “That’s pretty ambitious,” he said. “You think there are fifty thousand folks left you didn’t get the last time, even with Obama mania?”

  “We’re going to target new voters, the ones who are just turning eighteen, and people who aren’t affiliated with any church. Lots of them still floating around, and we’re going to add more churches because now they know the one hundred percent idea really works.”

  “You think it’s replicable up north?” Wes said as they passed a huge McDonald’s sign glowing at the end of the exit like a beacon, lighting the way home, one burger at a time.

  “Absolutely,” the Rev said, with conviction. “I’ve already looked at Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Baltimore. If I can get some boots on the ground by 2010, there’ll be no stopping us.”

  Wes had immediate visions of following a passionate and clueless Rev across the country, purging voters and suppressing turnout from one end of black America to the other. He ought to get a nice bonus and a sizable long-term retainer for his firm if he pulled this off. This whole thing had just fallen into his lap. All he had to do was be cool and reel the Rev in.

  “Listen, Rev,” Wes said. “Can I speak frankly?”

  “Of course.” The Rev turned slightly toward Wes.

  “I’m in a position to help you,” Wes said, choosing his words carefully. “The truth is, we’re in a position to help each other.”

  The Rev grinned. “You going to drive me to Albany, too?”

  Wes grinned back in the darkness. “I think I can help you find a sponsor.”

  “A sponsor?”

  “Someone to underwrite the expenses associated with a statewide registration effort. A corporation that could help you put those boots on the ground.”

  The Rev’s eyes hardened in the dark brown of his high cheek-boned face, but his voice didn’t change. “What are you getting at?”

  “You’ve got an active list of one hundred thousand people. Voting isn’t the only thing they can do, Rev. They also eat potato chips and drink Coca-Cola and buy back to school clothes for their kids.” He looked over to the Rev quickly and then back to the dark road. “My clients don’t care about politics. They care about consumers. That list is worth its weight in gold.”

  The Rev didn’t say anything and Wes wondered if he had made too big a leap.

  “Nothing too heavy-handed,” he said quickly. “But there would certainly be some interest out there in sponsoring, say, a tour for you around the state and, maybe later, something national.” He smiled but kept his eyes on the highway. “In exchange for the opportunity to communicate with the people on your list about the goods and services my clients want to provide.”

  “Communicate with them how?”

  “Email blasts,” Wes said. “Social networking sites. The whole nine yards.”

  That’s when the Rev let loose one of those great big boomers of a laugh. It was so loud in the closed space, the effect was what Wes imagined it felt like to hear a bullet fired in a car. What the hell was so funny?

  “Wes, these people don’t do email.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you been in the big city too long, boy. These folks don’t own computers. A good percentage of them don’t even have cable TV. Lord knows what they’re going to do when the government makes them go digital.”

  “So how do you communicate with them?”

  “We call them on the telephone. We send them letters in the kind of mail you put in a box. We place notices in their bulletins at church right beside the list of sick and shut-ins. We go knock on the front door and hope they invite us in for lemonade.”

  Wes felt like he was caught in a time warp. The Rev was carrying this old-school shit too far. “Don’t you find it frustrating to have one hundred thousand names on a disk and not be able to send them an email reminding them that tomorrow is election day?”

  “What disk?”

  “Your mailing list.”

  The Rev shook his head. “It’s not on any disk.”

  Through a time warp or down the rabbit hole. Wes couldn’t decide. “You lost me, Rev.”

  “Our registration drive was hands-on. Door-to-door. Every person who registered filled out a card for us, too, with their name and address, phone number if they wanted to, age, church affiliation, and anything else they wanted to say.”

  “What do you mean?” Wes said, passing a truck with the Target logo on the side.

  “Well, a lot of people we took down to register got really emotional about the whole idea of a black president so I told them if they wanted to put something down on the card for posterity, they could. Eventually, I’ll get Iona to go through the cards and gather up all of what they said. Put it in a book or something. That’s probably when we’ll get somebody to type it all up.”

  Wes had a sudden, sickening feeling. Type it all up?

  “Are you saying your list isn’t typed up anywhere?”

  “Not yet,” the Rev said cheerfully. “I’ve been trying to get Iona to do it for me, but she says if she wanted to spend all day staring at a computer screen, she’d still be working at The Sentinel. I keep trying to tell her I don’t want her to type it herself. I just need her to organize it for me, but you know I never could make that woman do anything she didn’t want to do.”

  “It’s all on cards?”

  “Index cards,” the Rev said. “Not the little ones. The five by sevens.”

  Wes took a deep breath. “Where are the cards now?”

  “I keep them at the house,” the Rev said. “Me and your pop just started stacking them in the big closet in my office and after a while, we had to take out everything else just to make room. They’re stacked pretty much floor to ceiling.”

  “The cards?”

  “The boxes.”

  Wes just drove in silence for a minute. Time wasn’t a big pressure yet. They had almost a month and a half before this guy was leaving the registrar’s office in April, but damn. He’d been thinking all he had to do was find a way to get the Rev to copy the disk for him, but of course that would be too easy. He couldn’t even imagine how long it would take to type one hundred thousand names into a c
omputer. He needed Toni to get her fine ass on a plane and get down here ASAP. She would know how to get it organized, because this wasn’t a big problem. This was just some word processing shit. The hard part was already done. He and the Rev had picked up where they left off. All they were talking about now were logistics.

  “Let me level with you, Rev. Old-school is fine, and you know I respect what you’re doing, but this is the twenty-first century. If you’re going to be a major player on the national stage again—and that’s where you should be, Rev, we both know it—you have got to step up and show these people you know what you’ve got and you’re not afraid to use it.”

  “By putting my folks’ names on a computer that any fifteen-year-old kid can hack into and sell to the highest bidder?”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” Wes said. “Security?”

  “I’m not worried,” the Rev said calmly, turning on the radio. The DJ was playing Betty Carter and the Rev turned it up. They were getting close to Atlanta. “I’m just enjoying the ride.”

  Wes was afraid he had pushed too hard, too fast. Old-school wasn’t just an idea to the Rev. It was a code of conduct. A way of moving through the world that required constant vigilance and maximum control. Of course, his list was stacked in the closet where he could keep an eye on it personally. He knew what the Rev was thinking: How much safer could it be? Or was he?

  “You know, Wes, a couple of days ago, my estranged wife called to tell me I was a dinosaur,” the Rev said.

  “Well, my ex-wives have come up with some pretty creative ways to insult me.” Wes chuckled sympathetically. “But that’s one I’ve never heard before.”

  “She accused me and my whole sorry generation of Negro leaders, her words not mine, of outliving our usefulness. Said we need to go on a retreat and get our shit together. Again, her words, not mine.”

  “She’s sounding more like my exes all the time.”

  “Well, I don’t feel in any way like a dinosaur, but I guess in an age where everything happens in the blink of an eye, an old fool with a closet full of index cards must look a little ridiculous.”

  Wes relaxed. He obviously hadn’t fucked up too badly. The Rev was talking to him man-to-man as they sped down the Georgia highway.

  “When I said I could help you, Rev, I didn’t know it then, but maybe this is what I meant.” Wes stretched out the dino metaphor just a little longer. “Maybe I’m supposed to help you get out of the stone age and bring you into the modern world.”

  Betty Carter was scatting her ass off and the Rev was unconsciously patting his foot to the beat. “Shoe boxes and all?”

  Wes laughed. “Shoe boxes and all.”

  It was time to close the deal, this phase of it anyway. The part where the Rev agreed to place himself in Wes’s capable, almost-like-family hands.

  “How about we do this, Rev, my assistant is coming down tomorrow. Let me see if we can put our heads together and come up with some ideas to get things moving.”

  The Rev seemed to consider Wes’s offer as the sign told them they were only twenty miles from Atlanta. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, almost overshadowed by the music. “Can I ask you a question, Wes?”

  Wes turned the music down a little. “Go ahead.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  The directness of the question surprised him, but he was ready for it.

  “A big part of how I make a living is trading in access and information,” Wes said slowly. “Opening an office in my hometown is a lifelong dream, but this is a tough market. Being able to tell potential clients I’ve got an active list of one hundred thousand Georgia consumers will give me a leg up on any and all competition.”

  “Consumers or voters?”

  “You can decide, Rev,” Wes said. “I’m all about consumers because that’s my bread and butter, but once we get things squared away so you can access it easily, that list belongs to you. You retain all the rights and you don’t have to let anybody use it for anything you don’t want. Including me.”

  The Rev smiled, but didn’t turn his head. “All right, then,” he said. “Me and your dad will be traveling this week, but Ida B can let you in so you can take a look at the card closet. See what you think. Then when I get back, we’ll talk again.”

  “Good enough,” Wes said.

  They rode along in silence, each man with his own thoughts and then the Rev spoke up. “What’s his name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “Your assistant. So I can tell Ida B.”

  “Toni,” Wes said. “Toni Cassidy. She’s a woman.”

  The Rev shook his head. “Sorry. My wife would call that a patriarchal assumption.”

  Wes chuckled at the modern American feminists’ well-known propensity for argumentative naming of sexist phenomena.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, merging onto I-20 and heading toward West End. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Sunflowers and Roses

  THE REV TOLD ME NOT TO WAIT UP FOR HIM, BUT OF COURSE I DID. I had grown up accommodating the Rev’s schedule. It was second nature to me and, truthfully, I liked having the house to myself. By the time I saw the car pull up out front, the fire had burned down and I was settled on the couch in what had been one of my favorite daydreaming spots as a kid reading a book Flora had given me. It was called Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street. These two guys, a writer and a photographer, went all over the country for a year, talking to people and taking pictures on some of the six hundred and fifty streets named after Dr. King. The book is a record of what they found. After too many bad jokes by too many black comedians about the need to run for your life if you look up at the street sign and realize you’re on one of those six hundred and fifty streets, it was great to see somebody take the whole idea of black America’s main street and flip it another way.

  I marked my place on the page where an artist who calls himself Franco the Great, the Picasso of Harlem, was explaining how he started painting murals on the metal riot gates that store owners use on 125th Street to secure their properties from thieves. When I went to open the door for the Rev, he was already coming up the front steps. Wes, idling at the curb, tapped the horn in friendly greeting. I threw up a hand as he pulled away.

  “Welcome home,” I said, kissing the Rev’s cheek, and stashing his briefcase next to the hall table while he put away his coat and hat. “How’d it go?”

  “It went long,” he said. “I think I presented every child in Macon with an award for something.”

  “Well, I’m sure they deserved it,” I said, poking the fire back to half-life. The Rev sat down in his favorite chair, loosened his tie, and sat back with a sigh. “They’ll probably remember this day their whole lives. Like when I got that letter from Mayor Young for writing the best essay about Atlanta when I was ten? I still have it.”

  The Rev smiled at the memory. “Andy was always good about communicating with constituents. Not as good as Maynard, but pretty good.”

  As the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson would always hold a special place in the hearts of Atlantans who were old enough to split time into before and after his election. As a young pastor, the Rev had worked to send Maynard to the mayor’s office all three times, and as far as he was concerned, nobody had ever done the job better.

  “Want some cocoa?” I said. “I got marshmallows while I was out today.”

  “How about a glass of red wine?”

  I poured us each a glass and touched his lightly. “What are we toasting, daughter?”

  “Us,” I said. “You and me sitting by this fire. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Good enough for me,” he said and took a long, grateful swallow of merlot. “How’d the assembly go this morning?”

  “You would have loved it,” I said. “The principal had Precious Hargrove there to introduce Mr. Eddie and Lu led the garden kids in this great poem about how growing things had changed t
hem …”

  “Did you have a chance to speak to the senator?”

  I hesitated, wondering if this was the time to pass on her concerns. “I did. She said … she was sorry you two hadn’t spoken in a while.”

  “Those Chicago Negroes aren’t going to let her speak to me.”

  “You should call her,” I said. “She’s got some information about …”

  He didn’t even let me finish. “If she’s got something to say, my number hasn’t changed.”

  I steered our conversation back around to Mr. Eddie. “Flora got a proclamation from Mayor Franklin and at the end of the program, they read it out and declared this Edward Harper Day in Atlanta.”

  The Rev laughed. “Well, ain’t that nothin’? I guess I’m going to have to drive him down to Albany tomorrow instead of him driving me.”

  “How’d your second string handle the job today?”

  “Wes?” The Rev chuckled and slipped off his shoes, stretching his legs toward the fire, wriggling his toes in their black thick and thins. “I wore that boy out.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” I said, picturing the two of them zipping around Macon all day. “You see I had the good sense to stay right here.”

  “He wants to find me a sponsor.”

  “A what?”

  “A sponsor. He seems to think one of his clients might be willing to make a sizable contribution to BAC-UP! so we can keep our registration drive going.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  The Rev looked at me and nodded. “Good girl. That’s exactly what I asked him.”

  “And?”

  “He said anybody doing business in Georgia would see the value of having access to the folks on our mailing list.”

  Miss Iona’s warning whispered in my ear: I don’t think the Rev has any idea how many people would love to get their hands on that new voters list he keeps bragging about.

  “What kind of access?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. We’ve never had a sponsor before. I don’t know exactly how it works.”

  “I do. They underwrite all your expenses and in exchange they put their name on everything.”