Being Clem

by Lesa Cline-Ransome

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2021 by Lesa Cline-Ransome

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  Printed and bound in June 2021 at Maple Press, York, PA, USA.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cline-Ransome, Lesa, author.

  Title: Being Clem / Lesa Cline-Ransome.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2021]

  Audience: Ages 8–12. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: When Clem’s

  father dies in the Port Chicago Disaster he is forced to navigate his

  family’s losses and struggles in 1940’s Chicago.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020039122 | ISBN 9780823446049 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780823448968 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Family life—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction.

  African Americans—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction.

  Chicago (Ill.)—History—20th century—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.C622812 Be 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039122

  ISBN: 978-0-8234-4604-9 (hardcover)

  For Linda and Bill Cline:

  My first teachers and tormentors.

  Agitators and allies.

  My big sister and brother. My best friends.

  ONE

  There’s 2,341 miles from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay. And even if you happened to catch a ride in one of those ’44 Silver Streak Pontiacs with the shiny front grilles that look like big ole teeth smiling back at you, and drove as fast as the wind, it’d still take you about a week to get there. 2,341 miles is a lot of miles. But it ain’t so far when an explosion that happens in San Francisco, California, lands right smack-dab in your lap here in Chicago.

  I was sleeping good when that explosion happened. I heard loud knocking on the front door, and Momma’s tired voice asking, “Who’s that?”

  I sat up in my bed, knowing there was no way company could be knocking on our door before Momma even called us in for breakfast. And then I heard her slippers scraping toward the door. Just as soon as Momma unhooked the chain and undid the bolt, all I heard after that was the screaming.

  Soft-spoken is how most folks describe my momma. She speaks her mind, don’t hold back on the truth, but she’s just as quiet as can be. Before that night, I never so much as heard her raise her voice, let alone scream, but there she was, shouting like she was broken in two. By the time I hopped from my bed and made it to the front room where all the screaming was coming from, my sisters were already there, plus two men I’d never seen before, dressed just alike, holding their hats in their hands. They looked like the picture of my daddy my momma kept in a frame hanging over our kitchen table. Soldiers. They were holding up my momma by her arms. A piece of crumpled-up paper was lying on the floor in front of her. Her head was rolling from side to side. Clarisse, my oldest sister, put her hand out to stop me.

  “Go on back to bed, Clem,” she said, staring at Momma. But even she didn’t sound like her usual mean self. So I stood there behind her watching our momma. It looked like her legs stopped working the way the soldiers had to hold her up.

  “Get her some water, son,” one of them said to me. But I was too afraid to move. I heard the water running in the faucet behind me and it was my other sister, Annette, filling up a glass. She brought it to the soldier, and he tried to get my momma to drink. Annette stood on the other side of me close.

  Momma stopped screaming but her head was still rolling from side to side. Clarisse stepped away from me, toward the soldiers. We never had white folks in our house before, and these soldiers looked funny standing here in our living room holding up our momma.

  “Do you have anyone you can ask to come over and sit with your momma till she’s… uh, feeling better?” the soldier asked. But looking at Momma with her head rolling every which way, I didn’t think my momma was ever gonna get right again.

  “It’s okay,” Clarisse told him. “We’ll be fine.” She walked to our momma and sat her on the couch. I could see Momma’s hand shaking in hers. Clarisse is only five years older than me, but talking to the soldier, and sitting on the couch calm as could be, she looked like the momma, and our momma looked like the child.

  “Good evening, then,” the soldier said to Momma, both of them tipping their hats to her. “Our deepest condolences.”

  Condolences. I had never once heard that word, but I knew as soon as the soldier said it, he was telling us he was sorry.

  Over the next days I watched my momma sit still as a stone in that one spot Clarisse sat her in. I don’t know who dressed her. Who combed her hair. How she did her business. She didn’t look like she even remembered who I was.

  Folks from our building and our church came in and out all day and night, whispering soft words away from Momma’s ears, in the kitchen, where they left cakes and pies and chicken and sandwiches on the table. “Explosives…” and “They still don’t know nothing…”

  “Nothing to bury… ,” I heard one of the whisperers say.

  My momma wore black, like any day now, we’d be going to a cemetery. Clarisse kept up her bossing, telling me and Annette to fetch this or get that or give Momma room to breathe when I tried to sit close to her and hold her hand and make her remember who I was. Reverend Maynard came over and prayed with Momma every day, and he might as well have been praying by himself. Momma sat with her head down, looking at her lap like it was the first time she’d seen it.

  Finally, my momma’s sisters, Aunt Dorcas and Aunt Bethel, came from Washington, D.C., and all of a sudden, they were like our momma’s momma. They got her up off the couch and had Clarisse run some bathwater, “Hot as you can get it,” they told her.

  When our momma started her moaning and crying, they held her tight, with her face in their necks, letting her tears run down their dresses, shushing her with “C’mon, Cecille,” and rocking her and rubbing her back like she was a little baby.

  “Why does Momma have to be quiet if she wants to cry?” I whispered to Annette when they were busy shushing.

  “Think they’re afraid she’ll start falling out, you know how the ladies do in church when they get the spirit?” Annette whisper
ed back.

  That made sense to me, but Momma didn’t look like the church ladies with their hands up in the air and their heads thrown back, praising. Momma looked like she even forgot who God was.

  Next thing I knew, my aunts moved me out of my room while they moved in. Clarisse is fourteen years old, Annette thirteen, but the way they looked when I showed up at their bedroom door with my blanket and pillow from my bed, you’d have thought they had to share a room with a newborn baby instead of their nine-year-old brother.

  “Aunt Dorcas said it’s just till Momma gets better,” I told them. Annette made room in her bed for me, but not before Clarisse rolled her eyes.

  Our aunts got our momma eating and talking just a little bit again. One thing I know is, Clarisse didn’t get her bossiness from our momma, but she sure got it from our aunts. It’s like they bossed our momma back to herself again, and that was all I needed.

  When I got up early one morning while everyone was still sleeping, I walked out to the front room and saw Momma sitting up on the couch.

  “Clem?” she said so soft, I could barely hear her.

  I walked over, making sure that was my momma talking, and stared hard at her puffy face. She almost looked like the Momma before the soldiers knocked on our door weeks ago. She reached out and pulled me onto her lap. And even though I was too big to be sitting on anybody’s lap, I let her hold me tight, and I rubbed her back, just like I saw my aunts do.

  Later I found out it wasn’t just my daddy who was killed in that explosion in San Francisco. There were 320 other navy men too. The Port Chicago Disaster, they called it. But didn’t nobody bother to count the four of us, Clarisse, Annette, Momma, and me, here in Chicago. Because that explosion that happened 2,341 miles away just about ripped us apart too.

  Before my daddy left this earth, I never thought much about him, and after he left, he was all I could think about.

  Reverend Maynard held a service at Emmanuel Baptist Church for my daddy the first Sunday in August, same day as communion. They had every one of my daddy’s pictures from our apartment up in front of the church on the pulpit, where the casket would have been if we had one.

  Reverend Maynard preaches so long on Sunday Momma has to poke me with her elbow to keep me awake, but this Sunday I wondered if he finally ran out of things to say because it seemed like bravery and honor and country were the only words he knew. We sat in the front row, where the deacons usually sit, and even though it was hot, Momma, Clarisse, and Annette wore hats and gloves with their black dresses. The lace from Momma’s glove scratched me when I held on to her hand, but I didn’t let go.

  After Reverend Maynard finished talking about what a good man our daddy was and after all the “amens” and “God bless hims” from everyone in the pews behind us, and after the choir sang, “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king. Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we’re going to see the king… ,” two soldiers walked up front and stood in front of us. They folded up a flag into a triangle and handed it to Momma. Momma didn’t reach for it like she was supposed to, but Clarisse did and nodded to thank them. They saluted us and turned and walked back down the aisle and out the church doors.

  Momma didn’t do any more falling out like she did that first day we heard about the explosion, but she didn’t do much of anything else either. She cooked, straightened up as best she could, always kissed us every morning and night. But she looked like she was half-asleep even when she was wide-awake.

  I ain’t like Clarisse and Annette and Momma. I don’t remember much about my daddy. He went off to the navy before I could get too many memories of him in my head. If it wasn’t for the pictures Momma keeps in the apartment, I might have even forgotten his face. But when I think of him, I think of water. Of a big ole lake. I couldn’t tell you if it was Lake Michigan or the Pacific Ocean, but Momma told me it was in South Carolina. And I remember it was hot.

  Momma says my daddy was born on James Island with the Ashley River just down the road, and he grew up fishing with his daddy and granddaddy. He once told Momma he was on the water so much, it was land where he felt shaky. I remember he sat me tall on his shoulders and let the cool, muddy river water touch the bottoms of my feet. Daddy floated high in the water with me holding on tight to his neck. When he went low in the water, I heard Momma say, “Careful, Clemson, you’ll scare him,” but my daddy just laughed and kept right on ducking in and out till I started crying. He brought me back to my momma, and I watched him swim like a fish all around while Clarisse and Annette sat and splashed each other at the edge. After a while, Daddy dried off with a towel, and he made a fire and we all ate hot dogs and potato salad and drank soda pop on a blanket.

  And I watched my daddy as he stuffed his mouth full of food and sat quiet looking out at the water. He reached over and held my momma’s hand, and I was squeezed up between the two of them, but it didn’t bother me at all.

  Right before school was about to start up, I came in the kitchen and Momma was already up at the stove making breakfast.

  “Morning, Momma,” I said, hugging her around her waist.

  She was quiet, kissed me on the top of my head, and went right on back stirring eggs.

  I sat at the table, waiting to eat.

  “Momma,” I said.

  “Yes, Clem.” She didn’t turn around.

  “You ever want to be a spy?”

  “Clem, I’m very tired,” she said.

  “But imagine if you went undercover as a double agent but as your disguise you were a cook behind enemy lines, and they loved your food. But one morning they came to breakfast, and you made your special eggs for breakfast, but they didn’t know your special eggs had poison in them. And one by one, the special eggs with the poison killed off all the enemies we were fighting in the war. You could end the war just by making eggs.”

  My momma was quiet, but I could see her body shaking.

  I jumped up from the table. “I’m sorry, Momma. I was just—”

  She turned to me and her eyes were wet. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Momma?”

  She put her hand down and let out a loud laugh.

  “Sit down, Clem, and eat your secret agent eggs,” she said, laughing some more. She was still laughing to herself when Clarisse and Annette came in.

  “I think your brother is reading too many of his adventure stories,” she said to them, fixing their plates. They looked at me with their eyebrows raised up.

  Even though my momma was missing my daddy and half-asleep too, I knew now, if I tried hard enough, I could still make her laugh.

  TWO

  Clemson. It’s a name that matches my daddy. Big, strong, and in charge. In the pictures of my daddy Momma keeps in frames in our apartment, in his sailor uniforms, he is standing tall over most of his navy friends on the docks or on boats out at sea. At Lincoln Elementary in every picture, from first grade on, they put me right up front, with the girls, so everyone can see that I’m just about the smallest in my class. Clem. It’s a little bitty name. I never had any problems with my name until Clarisse started in on me, saying “Look at little Clementine.” Clarisse took to calling me that until Momma made her stop. Now she only says it when Momma can’t hear. But a clementine is just what I feel like sometimes. Small and sweet. But the picture of me in fourth grade is the one I can barely look at. In that picture, everyone, even the girls, were heads taller. Thinking back on that time, before Daddy passed, reminds me now of how just a year before he died, my momma wrote my daddy about all the goings on here in Chicago, and then everything happening with me and Clarisse and Annette. And how she was sure to mention, right at the end, how I was probably the smartest student at Lincoln Elementary, and Daddy wrote right back saying he wished he was as smart as I was, and could I please wait till he got back to graduate high school. Momma laughed when his letter came in the mail and she read that part aloud to us. But my daddy never came back. And he’d never see me or my sisters graduate from anywhere.


  Out at recess, I ain’t too bad at marbles, and I can hold my own in dodgeball, but most of the other boys in my grade made me feel as small as my name. In the classroom, sitting in the back, when the other boys didn’t know the answers to Miss Schmidt’s questions, and I could whisper the answers to them so soft and sideways out the corner of my mouth you’d think I was a ventriloquist, was the only time I felt strong. But I thought even that was going to stop when Miss Schmidt sent a letter home to Momma in my satchel. I just knew Momma was going to be some kind of mad.

  “What does it say?” I asked her, standing, trying to read Miss Schmidt’s curly writing behind Momma while she looked over the letter.

  “Well,” she said slow, answering while running her fingers under the sentences. “Miss Schmidt would like me to come in and speak with the principal.”

  “Am I in trouble?” I asked her, already knowing the answer.

  “Why would you be in trouble, honey?” Momma asked, folding up the letter and looking at me.

  When I didn’t answer, she said, “Well, we’ll find out what it is tomorrow.”

  The next day when I got home from school Momma was waiting for me. “Sit down,” she said.

  I put my head down.

  “I won’t do it no more,” I told her.

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Give out the answers,” I told her.

  “Clem, are you giving out answers in class to the other students?” Momma didn’t look mad before, but now she did. I heard her taking God’s name in vain under her breath.

  “I see,” she said. She sat quiet, looking at me look at the table. “I think you can put your talents to better use than that, don’t you?”

  She sounded like I bet my aunt Dorcas sounded talking to the students she taught in her high school history class. And I sure didn’t want to think about Aunt Dorcas right now.

  “I’m sorry, Momma.”

  She nodded. Seemed like that was all she needed, and then she said, “I went to see the principal today.” I sat waiting for the part when the trouble was coming. “And both he and Miss Schmidt feel you are a very bright student,” Momma said. “One of the brightest.”