Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  The smell of smoke was too sweet to ignore, and they began to sense, without knowing for sure, that Abel needed them.

  Abel was in the kitchen drinking Coke from a bottle with his school friends, four black boys and a white one. The white boy, Ben, was Abel’s best friend and the only kid from his class. The brown boys were his friends too, but they were more like cousins than friends, and they were all younger, or at least in a different grade. James Hall was almost Abel’s age but James’s mother had let him stay home a year longer instead of rushing him off to kindergarten.

  James Hall was sure of himself. Abel liked to think it was because James was the oldest in his class. Abel liked being the oldest in the group. In his neighborhood gang he was usually the oldest. At school he was usually the youngest.

  Today Abel would be the first in the neighborhood gang to become a teenager. It felt significant, as if he was leaving his cradle friends behind and joining something bigger, the company of men, the world his white classmate Ben had been ushered into at the temple off Harding Road. Already this year Abel had been to two bar mitzvahs. The previous year he had gone to six.

  It was going to be a good day, better than Abel had expected. His grandparents had given him a trip to Los Angeles as his present. His father had given him the silver saxophone that Big Abel had used to play his way through college. And Abel knew the Fantastic Four had something for him, something big, something sharp, something he could show off with in front of the others and be proud of, something they would say he could “showboat”—if short, thick black boys with wire-rim glasses could showboat.

  He could almost imagine one of the kids from Buchanan Street sneering derisively, “Tugboat,” except they wouldn’t know the word. That made him smile. My arsenal is larger, he thought. Then the thought was amended. Abel had a vivid imagination. “Fat fuck,” the boys from Buchanan Street would say and snatch away what ever he had been given. “Fat fuck,” they had said when they’d taken his bike.

  When they punched him about the head, gently, not so hard as to make a mark or to really hurt him, they called him “white boy.” “You think you a white boy,” they said over and over again, but it was a lie. They thought he was a white boy, or at least as close to a white boy as they were ever going to see riding through the neighborhood, and so they showered him with soft punches, touching his nose and his mouth at their will. Les enfants terroristes. It was almost nice.

  Gnawing on the hot chicken drumsticks that his mother only fixed on holidays—chicken so crisp on the surface but so moist and soft inside, chicken just peppery enough in the crust that the Coke made your mouth explode, putting tears in his eyes (tears he never admitted were there, or let run down his face; Abel was excellent at fast blinking)—was not just a good thing. For Abel it was an almost perfect thing.

  Abel had silently acknowledged that chicken hot with fire and hot with spice and cold Co-Cola was his favorite meal. Then he had announced the thought to the group. It was his practice to check out what he said by stating it silently inside his head before saying anything aloud. Many thoughts he spoke inside his head he did not speak aloud. His favorite dessert was vanilla ice cream eaten with a barbecue potato chip as a spoon. He didn’t tell this. It was an uncool preference. When he invented that snack it surprised him that nobody else tried to dip into his bowl. He always got his fill of hot chips and ice cream. Odd tastes have their advantage.

  This day would be different. Watching the mouths of his friends as they chomped down on his mother’s fried drumsticks and chicken breasts, watching their hands as they grabbed for more, watching the napkins come back from their faces not greasy (Antoinette’s cooking was never greasy) but red with the traces of pepper and paprika, Abel’s stomach began to growl in protest. The likelihood he would get his fill that day was rapidly diminishing. The meat on the platter was vanishing faster than Abel could bite, chew, or swallow.

  They were talking about Bobby Fischer and the Munich murders and Abel even said something about Ferdinand Marcos declaring martial law in the Philippines, but he didn’t say much about it because no one else knew anything about the Philippines; so he just used the comment as an occasion to remind everybody that Thurgood Marshall was a close family friend by reminding them that he knew the Supreme Court justice’s wife was a Filipina. After that the conversation turned back to what all the neighborhood gang conversations turned back to that year, except when Abel was working to turn them in another direction, The Godfather. They all wanted to be Sonny, but Sonny who didn’t get killed; they were all afraid of being Fredo.

  The old men were in the backyard barbecuing ribs and shrimp, whatever Antoinette had marinated in her orange sink, drinking scotch and talking politics, lying about each other and telling on themselves—when they weren’t telling dirty jokes. Abel could hear their voices and their laughter rolling low and loud, like October thunder.

  The women were in the living room whispering and calling out, remembering and warning, their boozy high-pitched voices knocking together like chimes in the rising storm that carried the men’s words. Sitting on the floor with her legs spread out and a glass of something gold over ice between them, Abel’s mother, Antoinette, was looking at Sonia, the only young woman in the room.

  Sonia was beautiful. Tall and as dark as a light-skinned black girl could be, Sonia, the daughter of Antoinette’s best friend, also named Sonia, who had died a year or two earlier, had long tapering legs, large breasts, and a high, round, small derriere that made Antoinette wish she could wrap the girl up in tissue and put her on a shelf and give her to Abel as a birthday present three or four years down the road.

  She would have to surprise him with someone else. Sonia was courting an architect. If the architect didn’t marry her, somebody soon would swoop her up. You can’t hide a ripe mango. Or maybe you can. The University of Tennessee was a desert of whiteness in which Antoinette could imagine Sonia’s beauty being ignored, that rare place where the scent of Sonia’s attraction could hang in the air unnoticed. Antoinette wasn’t sure Sonia would be dating the old architect if she weren’t attending UT Chattanooga. He sees me, Sonia said to the older women, as if that explained everything. To the old women it explained nothing. Everyone they knew saw the girl.

  Antoinette winced. Big Abel had not done right by her goddaughter. There was nothing Antoinette could do about it, or at least nothing she knew to do. It would all work out, or it wouldn’t. Antoinette lifted her glass and drained it dry of everything but the ice. She slid a few cubes of ice into her mouth and began crunching on them. Someone was prattling on to Sonia about the University of Tennessee, about how lucky she was to be going to one of its campuses. Antoinette held her empty glass up above her head, letting the tinkling of the cubes announce her wishes. Somebody got up and filled her glass high with more of the blended scotch Antoinette preferred.

  UT Chattanooga was a good thing. It had the allure of the unobtainable. It was a new thing. Big Abel had encouraged it in a moment of true Big Abel–ness; the community was still applauding, still not comprehending, even with Sonia in their midst threatening to rot on the vine.

  Sonia, beautiful Sonia, was the punch line of a joke only Big Abel and Antoinette heard. Abel had encouraged Sonia’s daddy, his law partner, to send her to UT Chattanooga because he wanted to torture Chattanooga with her existence. A fresh black beauty just off the farm, whose daddy was a lawyer and whose uncle was a judge and who was wholly unavailable to white men. Big Abel wanted the white boys, he wanted the white men, to see this, to know this. It was something for his mother and something for himself. Abel Jones didn’t let himself think, or didn’t bother to think, what it was Sonia would see in Chattanooga. He didn’t care. He wanted Chattanooga to see Sonia, and want Sonia, and not have Sonia.

  He had struck a sharp deal to keep her safe. Big Abel had not thrown Sonia into the lion’s den. She was a woman. She was a girl. He would protect her body. He did not know if it was because he wanted a female body, o
r because he wanted a female body. He would not ask himself that question. Big Abel Jones master of blooming in the soil in which he was planted, never let a thing he couldn’t have remain significant. This was his advantage over other men. And he made it a great advantage by exploiting it. An advantage is not an advantage unless it is exploited.

  Abel had carefully structured the events surrounding Sonia’s matriculation. He had gotten the fathers of the city of Chattanooga to agree that they would see to it the girl was not molested in any way; in exchange Abel would push for no further integration of the university—at least not during Sonia’s tenure.

  Her situation was so different from that of the other female students of color that the other girls had begun to ostracize the privileged one. Very quickly Sonia had started dating her old man, an architect whose wife had left him.

  Antoinette wondered, sitting so close beside young Sonia that she could, and did, push locks of the washed and pressed glossy black hair behind the girl’s ear, so everyone could see her pretty face, how it could be, with all her beauty, that Sonia would throw her life away on a middle-aged man, a man who had given her an emerald-cut diamond ring but who clearly, at least to middle-aged brown female eyes, had no intention in the world of marrying his young lover.

  Antoinette coughed and took another swig of her drink. She knew exactly why it was she had thrown her life away. She had done what she had done for a good reason; she had done what she had done for the same kind of good reason most of the women gathered round her had sacrificed their lives.

  There were so many good reasons and they all had something to do, Antoinette was thinking, with finding a way to get into the room with the circle of women, getting to hear the thunder from the men in the distance, getting to hear the grunts of the sons close by your elbow, welcoming the silence of your own daughter and the other young girls, even as their scent rose in the room until it made the air hard to breathe and you sent them away on a fool’s errand.

  You throw your life away to get a house of your own. You barter your adventures for shelter, when the shelter comes with the sustenance of home.

  A home of one’s own was worth the price of what ever you did in the room with the bed, or what ever it was you didn’t do there. Or, so the little swirls in the scotch glass told Antoinette. How much time did anyone spend in bed not dreaming, anyway?

  Antoinette suspected Sonia wanted more from marriage than what Antoinette had; the late lamented Big Sonia had had something more with Sonia’s father. As much as Antoinette had loved her friend, she had been jealous of her, but not so jealous that she had not also been mutely adoring.

  Big Sonia had been the sweetest little drunk-girl-mama-wife anyone had ever seen fall into a bottle and drown. Maybe, Antoinette was thinking, gazing at Sonia, if the mother had figured out more about the living room and the kitchen, Big Sonia wouldn’t be dead and her husband wouldn’t be left looking backward with a smile, and her daughter wouldn’t be kissing old men.

  Antoinette wanted to tell Sonia to find her daddy the way he’d been when her mother had first found him, not the way she, the daughter, saw him now. Antoinette winced thinking of Sonia’s father, Vernon, looking into the eyes of his old friend the architect, just after one of the other ladies tried to coax from Sonia some understanding of the dimensions of the architect’s . . . richesse. Antoinette knew what Vernon, who never heard the raunchy side of any double entendre, would say: This old man, my old friend, will treat her like the piece of crystal I would treat my woman as if she came back to me from the grave.

  This was not true, but it did not matter to young Sonia, who was trying hard not to burst out and tell all the women in the room that she didn’t care if her old architect married her or not, it had done something for her to have him touch her body.

  What the architect had made her feel, other women had felt, but Sonia did not know this. Beige ladies did not talk to their brown daughters about such. Looking into the eyes of the women ringing round her, Sonia saw that the secret that was with her now was not now with them. Adding that knowledge to what her girlfriends told her about the fumbling of their young suitors— who want it again and again, but never for more than three minutes at a time; who bit your nipples so hard that however wet you were getting the little garden just dried up— all the gossip she heard over and over again, and all the gossip girls at the university whispered almost just out of her earshot, made her want her old man for as long as she had him, even if she knew this wanting had nothing to do with love. It wasn’t that he had made her a woman; it was that he had made her love being a woman.

  It was Sonia’s silent birthday wish for Abel that when he grew to be a man he would be a lover like the architect—not like his daddy.

  There was something nasty about Big Abel. Sonia didn’t know exactly what it was and never wanted to know better than she knew. But when she sat close to Antoinette, Sonia could feel that truth coming out of Antoinette’s pores smelling exactly like moonshine, like homemade liquor that left you dead not drunk, like something she had encountered in Chattanooga.

  As if he were still a baby and she were checking on him sleeping while his parents were across town carousing at some big event in a hotel with her parents, Sonia got up, walked through the breezeway, and entered the kitchen so she could see her boy. She was tired of explaining, and tired of withholding, and she loved little Abel.

  Only he wasn’t so little now; he was almost as tall as she was.

  Sonia found Abel sitting with his friends at the long bar dividing the cooking area from a dining area, in the kitchen Big Abel boasted was the size of a large small New York apartment.

  This room was filled with young people from Fisk and Meharry and a few from Tennessee State University making friends in the rising dim and din of early fall. School had been in session for a month and a little bit, just long enough for the new to wear off and the courting in earnest to begin. The dark was creeping up earlier and earlier. Al Green was on the stereo when the Jackson Five wasn’t. Sonia was slipping into a chair near the fireplace just as Michael Jackson was making promises he was far too young to keep, I’ll be there to comfort you. The phone started ringing. A TSU student answered it, then announced, to no one in particular, that the neighbor across the street was saying, “Go look outside your front door.”

  Sonia got up to go look. She was as close as it came to a responsible adult host in the room and it was an excuse to keep moving. Abel detained her. He called Sonia over, ostensibly to give him advice on playing his hand of rummy, but really to let Ben see, again, just how pretty she was. The phone was ringing again. Another neighbor was on the line.

  The next thing anybody knew, someone was banging on the front door and screaming, and then someone else was screaming and then everybody was up and rushing to the front of the house.

  Abel and his friends stayed rooted. Commotion was a frequent visitor in the Jones house hold. Abel knew from experience that it was usually best to stay out of grown folks’ way when they got real busy. The kid started dealing a second hand. He started feeling grown. He was for certain feeling superior and able. A white boy had come to his party and so had the neighborhood gang. His worlds were coming together. And Ben was the top of the class. Abel felt accepted in some “we are superior” way that amused him deeply—until the shouting started in earnest.

  Looking from the kitchen through the breezeway into the front room, he could see his mother rise from the floor. It was like seeing Niagara stretch and yawn. Antoinette didn’t rise from her chosen spot on the floor once a party began until after the last guest was gone except in cases of dire emergency. Antoinette started yelling for folk to stop acting a fool; her favorite all-purpose admonishment was consolingly familiar. Abel couldn’t see exactly what was going on, but he knew somebody was pressing on the doorbell because it rang and rang. A stout woman was barring the door from the inside, as if shielding Antoinette and everybody else from something they shouldn’t see. And someb
ody kept pressing on the doorbell. Out back, his father was drinking with the men, watching the meat on the grill, oblivious to the commotion.

  It was an opportunity. Abel put his cards down. Soon the very young man and his boys were dashing out the back door, dashing up the side of the house, leaving the old men— whom no one had informed about the phone calls, who couldn’t hear the doorbell, who ignored the shouts of the women— watching after their wake, unconcerned and unobserving, except of each other, as the kids made their way to the front of the house.

  There he saw it: seven feet tall and maybe three feet wide, a blazing cross. The flames looked alive, licking and taunting the air, even as they bit and danced.

  Abel peed his pants.

  On the other side of the blaze he could see his big friends from down the street completely stopped, frozen, at the moment they knew what they were seeing. A neighbor woman coming out to her porch screamed loud enough to be heard for blocks. Soon, Abel could hear his daddy’s voice behind him, cussing. Beside Abel on one side was Ben; on the other was James. Whacked upside his knuckle head by the absurdity and fright of the cross, Ben started laughing.

  Abel wanted to pee his pants again. Instead he ran, almost through the flames, abandoning Ben— as he wanted to abandon shame, and the hour, and the day, and his birth—to stand beside the biggest of his big friends, beside Opelika, who held a package shaped just like a basketball wrapped in newspaper.

  And so it was looking from across the flames that Abel saw his father slap Ben, then saw James rubbing at his own eyes as the smoke began to sting. From a distance Abel saw his father blinkingly observe the darkness down the side of Abel’s leg.

  He saw Opelika drop the basketball wrapped in the funny pages, saw the basketball bounce and roll into the gutter, saw Mount Bayou drop the box he was carrying, from close up.