Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  She told herself it would help her fit in at St. Paul’s. Most of the black students she knew who attended boarding schools were bright kids who lived in the inner city. And now she was one too. Sort of.

  When the beverage cart came down the aisle she palmed one of the vodka minis from the side of the cart without waiting to be served. The stewardess raised her eyebrows but didn’t say a word. First-class passengers are always right.

  Moving to U Street could not be a good thing.

  Drinking straight from the tiny bottle, she started thinking about Cornel Brown. The meanest thing anyone had ever said to her at St. Paul’s had been said midway through winter term of her first year, her third-form year, by Cornel Brown, a boy she wouldn’t kiss. At the time, the aftermath of the Mish Holiday dance, she had yet to kiss any boy, but Cornel Brown hadn’t known this.

  Her next significant encounter with Cornel occurred one of the first warm days of the year. There was a big group of kids smoking pot down by Library Pond. Cornel was the one black boy, and Clementine Hope was the one black girl. While they were untangling the fate of the universe, a white fifth-former from South Carolina, who was interested in Cornel Brown but feared Cornel Brown was interested in Hope, had asked Hope if she went to St. Paul’s as part of an ABC program. Hope had said, “No,” simply, but way too loud.

  Her passionate negation had been inspired by her strong attraction to the six-foot-four-inch Nubian warrior prince. She wanted Cornel Brown to like her, and she had formed the impression—growing up with a father who always responded to anyone who said they wanted to match him up with someone with the question “Does she have big breasts and big bucks?”— that it would be a good thing for her if Cornel Brown thought she was rich. About the breasts she wasn’t worried.

  Or had only just recently begun to worry, which probably had increased her anxiety about the money.

  She knew she had big breasts, which would have been perfect, according to the girls in her dorm, if her nipples had been pink or apricot instead of brown. That day, as a skinny-dip was being contemplated, and as the girls were teasing the boys by teasing one another about the parts of their bodies they wanted and didn’t want people to see, she was worrying about nipples. She was wondering how many of the other girls present— none was from her dorm or team so she didn’t know—had pink-tipped breasts. She didn’t want to be the only dark-chested one. A girl from New York with olive skin and a severe dyed-black bob, with black bangs grown long enough to hide her eyebrows and chopped straight across, declared, “Orange and pink nipples are like eyelashes without mascara: not enough contrast.”

  Before anyone could disagree, the girl, Tatiana, flashed the group, lifting the waist of her neon-blue spring sweater above her head and treating all present to a peek at large chocolate teats on tiny vanilla mounds and downy armpits.

  “Anything more than a mouthful’s a waste,” Tatiana squealed loud enough to be heard through the veil of the sweater. She too had noticed the charms of Cornel Brown.

  Some very bad boy asked, “Wouldn’t that mean you should have only one breast?” A girl jealous of the attention Tatiana was receiving purred, “I guess you haven’t seen Jules and Jim.”

  The display of tiny breasts, perfect mouthfuls, made the amply endowed Clementine Hope feel eclipsed. In a breath she was out of her clothes, into Library Pond, and back to being a center of attention. In another breath the others were in the water with her.

  The girl from South Carolina, in retaliation for Hope having what the boys were now calling “chocolate yummies,” said something, again, about ABC programs. Again Clementine Hope said, “No.” But this time there was some irritation in her voice. Cornel Brown dove deep and reappeared between Hope and the South Carolina girl.

  “Why you want to lie and say that?” Cornel asked. When neither girl replied, as neither was paying a speck of attention to what he said because both were fully distracted by how good he looked, Cornel plowed on. “Y’all’s both,” he was mimicking Clementine Hope’s accent, “on the original ABC program, the RWD program.”

  “What’s that?” asked Clementine Hope.

  “RWD,” repeated Cornel Brown.

  “RWD?” repeated Clementine Hope.

  “Rich white daddy,” said Cornel Brown.

  Someone laughed. Cornel kept talking. “All y’all’s got rich white daddies. Don’t keep signifying about my better chance. All y’all’s on the original A Better Chance Program.” Now everyone was laughing.

  It was a little like applause for Cornel and somehow for Clementine Hope too. She could hear in the merriment that the white kids had finally decided she was just like them after all, which was a very good thing. It was a very bad thing that the boy she found so intriguing, a black boy, was thinking she was just like them, the white folks, too.

  After the winter dance, she had turned away hoping he would snatch a kiss. He didn’t. Cornel Brown thought Clementine Hope was shying away from his brownness. He cut her with his eyes. Then he cut her with words. He had said he thought kissing her might be a violation of his promise to his mama that he wouldn’t kiss a white girl. What had made it so bad was he had said that before he even knew her daddy was white.

  She had told him, walking away, that her father was, for a fact, white. He hadn’t said four words in a row to her between the day she’d bitten him and the day they found themselves swimming naked together in Library Pond.

  The vodka mini was empty in her hands. She could do this. If all those A Better Chance kids could live in hard places and go to St. Paul’s and Exeter and Groton, she could too. They were no better than she was. She could do it. Those kids were great. She could be one. This would work. Her papa was dead. It had to work.

  Or maybe not. As the plane from Logan prepared for its final descent into Washington National, Clementine Hope peered out the window and wondered if she wasn’t moving into a whole neighborhood of Cornel Browns.

  Again, she wanted to heave. She looked imploringly at the young businessman beside her and pointed to the suit pocket where he had stuffed three vodka minis. He handed her one. When he said, “I went to Groton,” she was happy she was traveling in her St. Paul’s sweats.

  Aunt Sweet was waiting for her at the gate. She said Aunt Hot was waiting at the curb outside of baggage claim. When Hope got seated between the always-late-for-everything-but-work aunts in the front seat of their 1969 Duster, everything was all right.

  Eventually the Duster turned onto U Street. The neighborhood that had once been a celebrated Negro enclave was now dilapidated and dangerous—a ghetto with gorgeous architecture. One row house was in picture-perfect condition with a pot of red flowers blooming on every step. Hope was home.

  The aunts decided that to ease Clementine’s transition to Washington, they would spend the first week together as if it were a vacation, as they had always done on her visits, sightseeing: driving out to Arlington National Cemetery, looking at the jewels at the Smithsonian, where the aunts told her that the Hope diamond had been named for her, walking over the Mall, visiting the Capitol, taking pictures in front of the huge sculptures at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, eating dim sum in Chinatown— having a big time.

  It was a good time and a good week and would have been a great time and a great week, if it had been just a week. Seeing each other through the eyes of “family who reside in the same house” as opposed to “family visiting” changed things.

  Both aunts worked as domestics. One aunt worked for a black family and one aunt worked for a white family. Their world was more divided between those people who made messes and those people who cleaned up after them than it was between black and white.

  At St. Paul’s everyone—teachers, students, prefects, the rector— had always praised Clementine Hope for how hard working she was. If her papers weren’t usually in on time, they were always long and dense, and boldly argued. Nobody at St. Paul’s cared that her clothes were scattered across the floor or that she sometimes forgot
to pick up her plate or glass in the dining room.

  Nobody picked up after anyone else at the aunts’. The aunts did not understand skirts splayed on the floor just where they fell from your waist to your feet, or jeans thrown across a chaise lounge with, likely as not, bloodstains in the crotch, or wet towels on a tile floor, not folded neatly to dry on an aluminum bar. Hope began, for the very first time in her life, to worry about her deportment.

  And with very good reason. Over the course of the single week Hope and the aunts had roamed around Washington, the aunts had become increasingly fearful, eventually reaching a point of anxiety between panicked and deathly afraid, that their grandniece, before they could “get her straight,” would reveal to the world she had “No Home Training.”

  “No home training” was an indictment severe and broad: a critique of mother and child and relations. “No home training” was a pronouncement to be avoided by what ever means necessary.

  Real life started on a Saturday when the aunts, exhausted by a week of “looking at the mess on that chile’s head and not saying a word,” did what any two sane black women with a phobia of hair salons and a nappy-headed niece would do: they hustled down to the corner store and bought a box of Ultra Sheen relaxer.

  They did this while the girl was still sleeping. When she got up they fed her grits and bacon instead of French toast and strawberries and introduced her to the other joys of a regular Saturday. Go downtown and look through the stores. Go to the grocery. Clean the house. Have lunch late in the afternoon at Ben’s Chili Bowl. Get Sunday’s supper started. Re-clean the kitchen. Get out the magazines, black skillet, Wesson oil, the popcorn, and the salt. Find some phone books to plop into the kitchen chair. Grab the clean-stained towels.

  Promising to get her “fixed up right,” the aunts got Clemen-tine set up on a stack of telephone books in a kitchen chair tilted toward the sink. She thought they were washing her hair or putting on some kind of conditioner. Something started to burn. They kept working. She started into screaming questions the aunts ignored.

  “You hollerin’ loud enough to wake the dead, chile.”

  “Then let them get up!”

  “Hush!”

  “My head’s on fire!”

  “Hush.”

  “Did you do this to Canary?”

  “She got wicked white folk ways!”

  “What?”

  “Calling yo’ mama Canary.”

  “It’s her name.”

  “It ain’t her fault, Hot.”

  “Sweet, you say a thousand times we should go snatch Canary’s daughter back.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “This white stuff stinks.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “What happens if you leave it on too long?”

  “We don’t.”

  “I think my hair’s falling out.”

  It wasn’t. Clementine Hope let out a wail anyway. The aunts smiled. Complaining about the stink and fearing your hair was all going to fall out was a normal sixteen-or seventeen-year-old-girl thing to do mid-relaxer. They had heard their friends complaining about their daughters and granddaughters complaining about the very same things. This was the first very good sign. In the aunts’ minds they were turning into a near-to-normal family. They would laugh about all of that eventually, but that would be later.

  That afternoon Hope kept whining, and they kept putting the white paste on her hair and combing it straight. And she kept on keeping on whining and they kept on keeping on cracking jokes about her being “tender-headed.” Hope just kept whining and their hands kept moving.

  They rinsed her head in the kitchen sink. They gently poured warm water over her and when that was done they went at her with a blow-dryer, and when that was done they went at her with a hot comb and a curling iron and some blue hair grease. When they were finished they announced she looked just like a Jet magazine beauty.

  They stood her before the big mirror, each of the aunts taking a hand as they walked her from the kitchen up the front steps, toward the mirror that stood on three clawed feet in Aunt Sweet’s bedroom. It was Clementine Hope’s first time in the room.

  In the drunk that was the first summer after her father died, everything in the mirror was fragmented and reconnected wrong. Someone pretty was looking out at her. Someone she didn’t know.

  “You look just like Lena Horne.”

  “Who’s Lena Horne?”

  “What this chile doesn’t know, Hot . . .”

  “We teach her.”

  “I used to look like Canary.”

  She spent her first summer as an orphan cooking and getting fat. She grew from swimming in a size four to squeezing into an eight. She was sad and silent and the best the aunts knew to do for that was feed her. They taught her to cook, they said, because their catering business was finally getting going good that year and they could use the extra free hands, but really it was because they wanted her to be, just a little, like them.

  It was the summer of the Bicentennial and the summer Barbara Jordan addressed the Democratic National Convention.

  Because both of the aunts had arthritis in their hands, soon it was Hope putting the color on their heads and Hope letting her curls grow back. She thanked them in their language. “You love me enough to let me grow that mess back on my head?” she said, and the aunts nodded back “yes.” They were settling into their summer.

  The bank started bugging the aunts about moving. Sitting in their cosy U Street living room, as clean and polished as any in the city, the aunts listened as the trustee at the Riggs National responsible for Hope’s trust asked the aunts how they could possibly imagine Hope making friends in their neighborhood or bringing friends from out of the neighborhood to visit. He declared the neighborhood unsuitable. He warned the aunts that they would find somewhere appropriate to live before Hope left for St. Paul’s in September or find themselves in court.

  The aunts were more than a little surprised. Like an old man who looks at his wife of half a century and sees the girl he fell in love with, the aunts looked down the U Street corridor and saw an enclave of black achievement.

  When they had first come to town, LeDroit Park had been the place for blacks to live in Washington. And now the bank declared Shaw, as the trustee called it, an unfit neighborhood. The aunts, particularly Aunt Hot, wanted to poison the bankerman. Aunt Sweet said, later, that the bank would just send somebody else in this bankerman’s place and it might be a worse somebody.

  Aunt Sweet spoke the names Mary Terrell and Benetta Bulloch Washington and Alain Locke and Georgia Douglas Johnson, intending to impress. The bankerman sitting in their best front-room chair digging his elbows into a hand-crocheted doily had no idea in the world who those people were. He didn’t know why they were important, or where they lived, or had lived. Hope only knew a little more than the banker, but she could hear clearly that the aunts thought the neighborhood had a lot to boast and that the bankerman thought it had nothing.

  And she knew something far worse. Walking down the street with the aunts, sitting in the pews at church with the aunts, and watering flowers on the stoop with the aunts, she had come to see that some of the fancy people who remained in the neighborhood thought that the aunts, being maids who had never gone to college, were almost as emblematic of LeDroit decay as the dope fiends and the welfare queens, if not the dope dealers.

  “I don’t want to live here,” said Hope.

  The bankerman started to speak. Aunt Hot silenced him with a raised hand.

  “Hush!”

  “I want to live with you, but I don’t want to live here.”

  “Hush!”

  “No one lives here who’s not a thousand years old who can live somewhere else. I’m not a thousand years old.”

  Aunt Sweet stood. She walked over to her sister and took her hand. She had lost the child’s grandmother and never had her mother. She wasn’t losing Clementine Hope. Sweet squeezed Hot’s shoulder.

  “Who’
s gonna pay for this new house?” asked Hot.

  “The bank,” said Hope and the bankerman at the very same time. It was a lie that approximated the truth.

  They found a real estate agent and started making rounds. When they weren’t looking at houses they were cooking pies for restaurants and reunions.

  Eventually they found a pretty house on a tree-lined street with beige and brown and black families, lots of doctors and lawyers, and some people working for the antipoverty programs. Unfortunately, some of the wives toting casseroles to their porch recognized Aunt Sweet from her house keeping job and a few even recognized Hot from hers. It was a frosty late July. The aunts sought the help of a dear friend of their dead sister Emmaline, a woman called Red. Red had gone with Clementine Hope’s grandmother to Dunbar and to Howard and then, having married well and been widowed twice, had advanced considerably in the world. They invited Red to Sunday supper.

  Just after the soup they asked her to make some appropriate introductions to the new neighbors on behalf of Clementine Hope. The old friend said the neighbors would be tough—and that the neighbors were not enough. The child also needed the Jack and Jill. As the aunts were not, and never would be, in the Links, it would be hard. She offered the aunts the loan of her house on the Vineyard. She advised the aunts to take it for all of August and give a big party. She would charge them a very fair rent. A Vineyard stint would do the trick. She asked them if they still knew the old mayor’s wife. Before Hope’s new patroness was gone the aunts had Benetta Washington, their old neighbor, on the phone. Benetta said she would get Senator Ed Brooke to attend what ever it was they gave, whenever they gave it. August was settled.