Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  She had been making prompt and proper responses; now she began idling, withholding words. Abel had some crazy friends. He didn’t have many dumb ones. Lyttle was smart enough to get off the phone.

  Hope got up from the bed and walked toward her blue and white and gray bathroom. She brushed her teeth with an electric toothbrush, washed her face with a simple cotton cloth.

  Her mind wouldn’t get quiet or it was too quiet. She had to find a lawyer. Maybe two lawyers: one to sue the Confederate horse barn restaurant and one to represent Ajay’s interest as the will got settled.

  Hope, who knew what it was to be a black child who had never had a bill paid for by a black father, would not separate her son from that increasingly rare privilege or the always rare privilege of being a black child who inherits from his black father’s estate. She would find a way for Ajay to inherit from Abel without complying with any strange bits.

  The will as quoted to her seemed more a truckload of strange carrots and stranger sticks than a tool for the transference of wealth.

  Hope pushed a button and was ringing back the number Lyttle had rung her from, hoping he hadn’t turned his phone off. He hadn’t.

  “There are a lot of prohibitions in Abel’s will that you mentioned, lots of instructions, but you only mentioned what you called one simple bonus round.”

  “The two hundred thousand for going to medical school.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Abel wanted to be a doctor when he grew up.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “You didn’t know Abel very well.”

  “A fact becoming increasingly apparent.”

  “Does that mean you’ll set up a meeting between me and Ajay?”

  “It means you should expect a call from my lawyer.”

  “If you’re represented by counsel we shouldn’t be talking.”

  “Right.”

  Hope slammed down the phone. Had Abel wanted to be a doctor? Why hadn’t she known that? She called Waycross. He answered. He always took her calls.

  “Did you know Abel wanted to be a doctor?”

  “Yep, for sure.”

  “When did that change?”

  “He was thirteen.”

  “Thirteen?”

  “Yep.”

  “You remember that specifically?”

  “I remember he was thirteen.”

  “Why?”

  “Why, what?”

  “Did he stop wanting to be a doctor?”

  “Hopie, I’m freezing my ass off in a deer blind.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Abel started thinkin’ people like me didn’t have much power. And he didn’t have the right name.”

  “Right name?”

  “Daniel first, Hale middle.”

  “What?”

  “Bougie black medical world circa nineteen fifty. Good-bye. ” She appreciated the fact that her second husband had taken the time to say the word.

  TEN

  DRIVING DOWNTOWN, HOPE was thinking about how it came to be that her first husband had named her second husband. A thousand miles away, Waycross was thinking about the very same thing in a slightly different way.

  Once upon a time there was a man forgotten by time, but not by CPT: Daniel Hale Williams. Colored people in colored people’s time remembered the boy who began his working life poking a needle through animal skins (in the employ of a shoemaker, sewing hides) and who then became a barber quick with a blade (cutting hair, shaving beards) before his transformation into a surgeon, all preludes to his final metamorphosis into the world’s first heart surgeon.

  “Firsts” often involve tricky distinctions. Almost always the validity of the designation is dependent on a quantity of unknown information as well as on the quality of the known information. Claims of being the first this or that, and especially claims of being the first black this or that, are often disputed— and this one was— outside of the Negro world. Within the Negro world, Daniel Hale Williams was granted his laurel without dispute.

  The white world was different. Some argued that Williams hadn’t operated on the heart, he had operated on the sac surrounding the heart. Some argued that a person in St. Louis had performed a similar operation a year earlier but hadn’t reported it widely. Eventually there would be those who argued that Williams wasn’t really black, that he had had too many white ancestors to be counted as a Negro, negro, black,African-American, colored, or nigger.

  The Fantastic Four, Waycross and his three med school roommates, believed what they had been told: Daniel Hale Williams was the world’s first heart surgeon and he was a black man. They were entranced by those twinned facts and simultaneously scarred and made fraternal by the understanding that their names were his tombstone.

  Their shared history as sons of fathers who wished they had been born Daniel Hale Williams’s sons was also a profound connection. Sometimes it was as if they had been spawned, and this was discussed aloud one drunken night at Howard University, by one man off four different fathers, with no mother in it anywhere. The Fantastic Four reveled in a mystical sense of special camaraderie, drunk or sober.

  That they shared an idea—Abel’s eventual favorite writer, Machado de Assis, would have called it a fixed idea—about Williams’s surgery, as well as sharing names, served to make the bond among the physicians in training that much stronger. Their fixed idea was that they had been present at, and witness to, as the sons of their doctor daddies, the emergence of a black man as disciplined actor informed by theoretical knowledge.

  That Dr. Dan, such an elevated black man, would have put himself in the service of a street criminal, would have determined to save a fallen warrior’s life, and that he would have been audacious enough to invite witnesses to watch the rescue, they under stood to be an assertion of the significance of every black life, including the poor and the foolish, including the violent. Dr. Dan’s audacity added immeasurable sweetness to the deal.

  And so eventually Waycross and Mount Bayou and Ope-lika and Yazoo City were called by the towns from which they hailed and not by the name of the great pioneer. Daniel Hale Williams was too damn popular. Abel said that when he was still a boy, just before he named them Waycross, Mount Bayou, Opelika, and Yazoo City. Just after that he begged Way-cross to continue with the story of Dr. Dan and how he had changed the mythology of the Talented Tenth. That day in the little house next door to Big Abel’s, Waycross had said, “Into the history of the Swordsman arrived the Surgeon.” He had begun to tell Abel about an alternative warrior identity, an alter-native construct of male competencies in a new and modern era.

  How far beyond the dull tool of John Henry’s hammer was Williams’s sharp scalpel? The scalpel that required brains and balls to approach the very heart of a man did approach, on the evening of July 9, 1893, the heart of a specific man, James Cornish, and there were invited witnesses, black and white, male and female. Williams would later speak of the nurses repeatedly, and they did something, gossip, to further the news. All of this came together to make Williams, for black men of science, what Pushkin was for black men of letters: a reason to hold your head up high.

  The hammer, John Henry’s hammer, only touched materials. John Henry bested a machine. With hands dripping blood, Daniel Hale Williams bested God and other men. Williams aimed to snatch a man back from the jaws of death, renouncing heaven’s or hell’s claim on the body, telling heaven or hell, or just death, to wait.

  That was the story Waycross had told Abel, and that was the story he told Ajay on the road to Idlewild. He didn’t tell Ajay that Dr. Dan had cheated on his wife, Alice, with a French woman and had applauded Alice’s stoic silence with a midnight-blue Woods electric coupe. He didn’t tell Ajay that somehow this gave Waycross justification for his affair. He didn’t boast and say, “My daddy alone actually studied directly with Dan at Provident.” Didn’t say, this gave me more than justification, it gave me immunity. Didn’t say, the hospital Williams founded, Provident, closed in 1987 only
to rise phoenix like in 1993. Didn’t say, I’ve been a hard dog to keep under the porch but that’s going to change and some of it’s because someday soon you going to be big enough to knock me down if I do your mama wrong.

  Hope wasn’t ruminating on any of those salacious bits; she was wondering who the first black American spy was—and pondering the probability that his, or her, name would have tripped quickly to the tip of Abel’s tongue.

  ELEVEN

  NICHOLAS, WEARING AN amazing black western tailored jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots, was standing just inside the glass front doors of the Hermitage Hotel when Hope pulled up in her red MINI Cooper. He did a little spin before he got into the car. Rhinestones and sequins sparkled, outlining black-on-black appliquéd palm fronds.

  “Do I look like Gram Parsons?”

  “You look like Johnny Cash channeling Gram Parsons.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re not exactly dressed for Silver Sands.”

  “Where?”

  “Soul food.”

  Silver Sands started serving breakfast at five A.M. to cater to working men and women who had to be on their jobs by six or seven. The restaurant was housed in a building with orange and white checkerboard walls just off Jefferson Street, the main commercial thoroughfare of North Nashville, home to the old black bank, Citizens Bank, and to many churches, several fast-food franchises, and the one and only Mary’s barbecue. It was also the road that connected Fisk and Tennessee State University. Silver Sands looked more like a place to drink and shoot pool than a place to eat, but that appearance was deceptive. The eating was good.

  Hope pulled right up to the place. The noses of the other cars were almost touching the building and their butts were hanging out on the street. The MINI Cooper fit easily on the blacktop.

  Inside the restaurant there was odd paneling and no table ser-vice. Diners stood in the shortest cafeteria line in the world and picked their dishes from a steam table that offered a clear view of the food and let them point to what they wanted. Hope loved the fried bologna topped with grilled onions and the grits swimming in butter and the country ham. Folks came from miles for the tender liver.

  At seven thirty in the morning the restaurant was halfway through breakfast and bustling. Hope and Nicholas were comfort ably ignored. People stopped in to pick up to-go orders, and people arrived to walk through the line, then sit and eat. There was a sign that reminded customers to put the money in the servers’ hands because drafts created by opening the sliding doors would blow money into the food on the steam table. The place was full of people, most of them men, who didn’t have anybody to cook for them.

  Nicholas and Hope were seated at a wooden table. Each of them had a plain white china plate in front of them filled with grits and pork and stewed apples. She had the country ham; he had the fried bologna. They both had coffee.

  “Is this a place Abel ate?”

  “Places like this scared Abel.”

  “Places like this don’t scare you?”

  “The first one I went to scared me, the first few times. Then I fell in love.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Ben’s Chili Bowl. Washington. The seventies.”

  “I play good shrink.”

  “You play shrink?”

  “Do you want to talk about him?”

  “Yes. I don’t have to worry about making you jealous or sad.”

  “Jealous would be Waycross, sad would be Ajay?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Are we near the barber shop where Abel met King?”

  “Craighead’s? Very near.”

  “You’re taking me on a battlefield tour?”

  “Battlefield?”

  “Abel’s Civil War.”

  “I forgot that phrase.”

  “You coined it.”

  “What did he tell you about his Civil War?”

  “He talked a lot about the student riots.”

  “Black student riots.”

  “Abel thought he was going to be killed.”

  “He hated his father for not moving out of this neighborhood after that,” said Hope.

  “And now, you say, he’s left Ajay the house.”

  “It seems he had already had the house put in Ajay’s name, but his inheriting other things is dependent on his living, at least part-time, in the house,” said Hope.

  “That’s wild.”

  “That’s Abel.”

  “ ‘Dave Evans played Cupid.’ That’s how Abel liked to start the story when he told the story of how you met and fell in love. Who was Dave Evans?” asked Nicholas.

  “Dave Evans was, and is, a Harvard admissions officer. Dave began life as the son of sharecroppers, then rose to play a pivotal role in defining the shape of forty Harvard classes. He admitted Cornel West. What did Abel say about Evans?” asked Hope.

  “That Evans had said three sentences on behalf of him: there were a few low grades to overlook, or perhaps more than a few, but there were perfect SAT scores. And maybe five sentences on behalf of you. They had so many excellent St. Paul’s candidates that year, but two Dickeys and being from the same state as Skip Gates held sway, and envelopes that might have been thin were fat,” said Nicholas.

  “You’ve heard his version; do you want to hear mine?”

  “If I’m allowed to embellish and amend.”

  “You are.”

  Hope and Abel had fallen in love while undergraduates at Harvard, but the tumble, at least for Abel, had occurred not in a Yard dorm or classroom, or in a River House, or up at Radcliffe Quad; it had happened in a Beacon Hill dining room, on Pinckney Street.

  Abel had been secretly proud of this fact. Falling in love with a ’Cliffie on the Yard or in a River House was too Love Story for him.

  Their first kiss occurred a year and a half after first sight. When they were both far from home (and close to the place where they would come to think they had begun, the Flying Horses, a carousel on Martha’s Vineyard), he did not resist her and she did not resist him.

  The Sunday lunch had been hosted by a Mr. S———, who was a descendant of a more famous Mr. S——— who had been the subject of a book, albeit one commissioned by S———’s family, written by Henry James.

  Hope and Abel had been interlopers, both dragged in tow by a roommate who had a father who had gone to Harvard with this S———. CeCe, born in Hong Kong (when her father had been a war correspondent in Vietnam) but of Japanese ancestry, had been there because her parents had crossed paths with this S———’s wife, first in Paris and later in London (her father circulated from bureau-chief post to bureau-chief post), and the wife had promised to entertain their daughter in Cambridge. Windsor Armstrong, whom Hope had met in Washington, had been there with her sister, whose name Hope could never remember. And the man who would help found the Lampadia Foundation, which would rescue elephants in Africa and children in Brazil and republish Machado de Assis, who had been at Harvard with S———, he, Bob Glynn, had been there as well. He was the one who had brought along the Armstrongs.

  The rest of the group had been shiny, smug, and bright in the way one might expect of the sons and daughters of Harvard men who had graduated between the dropping of the atom bomb and the sparking of the Sexual Revolution. The progeny of a new modernity, having endured their parents’ wild vacillations, bold experimentations, burgeoning wealth, and various therapies, had been almost jaded, over-entitled, oddly earnest, and definitely hungry.

  They had swarmed the sideboard laden with savories prepared by S———’s Danish wife, a tiny woman with a blond and silver bob who had been married to a famous photographer. With several of the young guests claiming to be aspiring photographers, and all Harvard students of this ilk being budding philoso phers, the conversation had quickly turned to Susan Sontag and her new book, On Photography.

  Before too long, the wise wife had deftly redirected the conversation toward sculpture, her present husband’s most famous ancestor having bee
n a sculptor. Somewhere in the middle of that discussion, Hope had stated that she had always been puzzled by the black soldier depicted in the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Someone else had quickly explained it away by saying that he must have been just some man sent to the war with his master, and Hope had said he looked like something else to her, a Hatfield. Everybody had just stared for a moment, until she had explained, “Hatfield, like Hatfields and McCoys. I’m from West Virginia, y’all.” When she had said that, everyone had laughed.

  And Abel had fallen in love. He had been fifteen years old the first time he had gone to Arlington National Cemetery, and he had noticed that same black man. He had gone in a school group, on his private high school’s official Washington trip, to see Kennedy’s grave. After they had got through that, before they could head for the gates, someone in the class had announced he had Confederate ancestors buried in the Confederate section. Then someone else had said he had one too. Before they knew it the entire group had been heading toward the Confederate Memorial. Abel too. Abel had refused to be so typical a black and proud “Negro” as to say no. He had refused to make his displea sure known. He wouldn’t be scared off any acre or inch of the place. He would stick in the middle of the group. He would blend in, until he could safely vanish.

  Walking around the base of the Confederate monument, Abel had first noticed the mammy, holding up the child to be kissed. The mammy had made Abel wince. Then he had seen the soldier— seen the soldier and known in that moment that he was to be a soldier.