In Search of Pretty Young Black Men

by Stanley Bennett Clay

  Chapter Four

  Maggie was twenty years old when she heard the announcement on her car radio: Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot.

  She remembered wailing suddenly, tears obstructing her view and thick traffic eating her alive. She remembered beating the steering wheel with trembling fists, and yelling and screaming and cursing every white man who ever lived.

  Through her tears she could barely make out the Avis rental truck crossing in front of her. She was shaking her head and slamming on brakes. She heard herself screaming, tires skidding, car horns blasting. Then there was a sudden, horrible jolt and the crash of breaking glass. There was a heavy pounding in her head and she puckered with a frown at the taste of warm salty wetness in her mouth before everything faded to black.

  She could feel herself floating away into an abyss.

  In an unstirred darkness she could see herself in a gilded mirror that seemed to be suspended on distinct nothingness. But no, it was not a mirror, not a reflection. No. It was her, the real her, asleep, pretty, a black sleeping beauty, a twenty-year-old, now going to UCLA, living life and the struggle.

  But now it was good-bye. Good-bye to UCLA and the marches and the protests. Good-bye to the brothers and the sisters.

  She then felt herself being pulled deeper into the darkness, swept away by a rushing unsympathetic whirlwind with strict schedules to keep. The body of the black sleeping beauty grew smaller and smaller, like a little doll left orphaned on the railroad bench with its fixed Mona Lisa smile that masked confusion, not mystery, while the train pulled away.

  She was desperately reaching out from the back of the train, the moving train, reaching out for the little orphaned doll so cold and alone on the railroad bench. But Reverend King, her traveling companion, was holding her back and counseling her to stay on the train and leave the doll: Yes! Do stay on the train, sweet sepia daughter! Stay on the train and ride with me unto greater glory!

  But twenty-year-old Maggie Arial Simpson, naïve and stupid and spoiled or not, knew herself well enough to know that she had not had her fill of earthly glory. With a new attitude she started pulling away, pulling away from the good Reverend and reaching out with a brand-new fervor, reaching back for the doll, reaching back for UCLA, reaching back for the brothers and the sisters, reaching back for The Supremes and Mamma’s macaroni and cheese. She was reaching back for Sadikifu, reaching back for the feel of hard nipples under the spray of brisk morning showers and this week’s clearance sale at Saks Wilshire and the presidency of the Marcus Garvey Association. Reaching back.

  “No! No! No!”

  And then there was a sleepy moan. And then another. And another. Her moans.

  Her eyelids seemed to weigh a ton when she tried to lift them. When she finally did, the white heaven surrounded her. And it was stark, muted, and cold as winter rain. Doctor King was standing over her, smiling his angel’s smile. He was younger now. Much younger. A little boyish yet strangely stern-handsome. Maggie now had proof that heaven, as had been rumored, truly was the great rejuvenator. He looked fabulous.

  “That’s much better,” he said sweetly. And now, as Maggie stared into his stern-handsome face, she knew that she had escaped the train, had jumped off like Redford and Newman after looting the mail car.

  But then it hit her like a ton of bricks. The stern-handsome face was not that of King’s. The King had been shot. Shot!

  Seeing the new startle and grimness that now filled her eyes, the young doctor with the stern-handsome face bent down to her and stroked her face with professional sympathy. “Get some rest, Maggie,” he said gently. She could see a caring in his eyes that tried so hard to be detached. And now she knew for sure. She could see it in the young doctor’s eyes; the reflection of her own realization. King was dead.

  Dead.

  She could not help herself. She started to cry while the young doctor continued to stroke her face.

  “Nurse, prepare a half dosage,” he said flatly.

  “Yes, Doctor Lester-Allegro.”

  And moments later Maggie’s sorrow had dissolved into a chemical Nirvana and all she remembered was the stern-handsome face and the strange musical name, Lester-Allegro.

  Maggie Arial Simpson’s recovery was swift and successful. Her beautiful face—the doll face—displayed no traces of the accident. The small scars had healed surreptitiously and the only telltale sign of her hospital stay was her obvious schoolgirl’s crush on her handsome and ever attentive physician. And as if designed by romantic oracles with sweet-ending stories, young Doctor Lamont Lester-Allegro found himself equally enchanted by his patient.

  Lamont’s father, Doctor Abner Lester-Allegro, was moderately pleased and relieved. He concluded that Miss Margaret Arial Simpson would do: not too overwhelming to be distracting, striking enough to dispel rumors.

  Joshua and Lahti Simpson were very pleased. Their daughter had landed a member of one of the most prominent black families in the city. The social hoopla of the union would more than cover up the faux pas of the past.

  Yes, Maggie mourning the death of Martin Luther King Jr. was just fine and right proper. But mourning the far less significant death of this Sadikifu Omoro was an embarrassment. Sadikifu was a bothersome radical who wore loud dashikis and had kink-nappy hair, expressed himself with “Black Power” fists held high in the air, spewed subversive ghetto poetry with heathen audacity, and was killed for his trouble almost a month before Maggie’s accident. He was shot by UCLA campus police with such Wagnerian élan that the L.A. Times ran his picture on the front page. His funeral, featuring an open casket, made the centerfold of JET. Fortunately for Joshua and Lahti Simpson a link between Sadikifu and their daughter never appeared in print.

  And now the Simpsons religiously courted Doctor Lamont Lester-Allegro, who actually needed little encouragement in his pursuit of Maggie. Maggie, reeling from and disillusioned by the tumultuous events of the previous two months—the loss of a hero, a lover, a cause—had grown sick enough of reality to long for a bit of the dream her parents had always been selling.

  It was of no surprise to anyone that she and Lamont Lester-Allegro, after having known each other for such a short time, married with all the pomp and pageantry befitting a refined young lady of Baldwin Hills. Lahti Simpson arranged everything, and with the help of her Eastern Star sisters, pulled off the wedding of the year eight weeks to the day from the proposal.

  Reverend James Cleveland’s Universal Tabernacle Choir filled the expanse of Ward AME church with a surprisingly subdued and dignified joyful noise. Milton Williams, caterer to the stars, masterminded a reception of gourmet delectables and vintage champagne that bordered on debauchery.

  The grand ballroom of the Century Plaza Hotel was filled with ta-ta celebration long after the happy couple had bid their adieus. All Doctor and the new Mrs. Lamont Lester-Allegro wanted to do was stretch out and hold hands as they settled in for the Concorde’s takeoff to a two-week honeymoon in Gstaad, where, coincidentally, Lamont would be attending a medical convention.

  And it was then and there, all alone in the hotel suite while Lamont golfed with a medical colleague, that Maggie first began to experience the nausea and dizzy spells.

  She was not fully certain how she knew, but she knew. She was pregnant with Sadikifu’s baby. Sadikifu Omoro had been dead three months—thirteen weeks to be exact—and now his baby was growing inside of her.

  The new Mrs. Lamont Lester-Allegro stood in her hotel room steadying herself against the sway of her morning sickness and the wilt of her predicament. She stared out past the terrace where the Alps looked like Sno-Cones. She circled with delicate fingertips the tuck of her navel that hid the growing child while she pondered, worried, debated, and prepared a useless defense.

  It was 9:30 A.M. Lamont would be returning from the course at noon. They would lunch at the Café Palazzo de Richet and sightsee before the evening seminar Lamont was sponsored to attend.

  At ten past twelve she heard the key in
the door. A double martini ordered up from room service had not done the trick.

  “Lamont?” she said with a quiver in her voice that alarmed him as he came through the door and that caused him to drop his golf clubs and take her in his arms.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” He could smell the liquor on her breath. “Are you all right?”

  “Lamont, I think…”

  “What is it, darling?”

  “…I’m pregnant.”

  “Don’t be silly, darling,” he laughed as he hugged her in relief. “It’s much too soon since we first…”

  It then hit him while he held her. Her body trembled slightly. His body stiffened. He slowly pulled away from her and stared coldly into eyes that tried desperately to turn away.

  “What are you saying to me?”

  She closed her eyes tightly and a single tear fell.

  “Sit down,” he said in a cold, soft tone. She did and he disappeared into the bedroom. Moments later he returned with his medical bag.

  “I didn’t expect you to be a virgin, but I’m sure as hell not ready for this. Take off your robe.”

  She did so.

  “When was your last period?” he asked as he examined her.

  “Two months ago.”

  He looked up at her.

  “I’ve skipped a month before,” she defended quietly. Not another word was spoken by either of them until the exam was over.

  “It’s too late to do anything about it,” he muttered out loud to himself, putting words to an unthinkable thought. “Who’s the daddy?” he then demanded.

  She told him in a whisper.

  “Who?”

  “His name is Sadikifu Omoro.”

  At the Café Palazzo de Richet they ate in steely silence, like death-row convicts having their final meal. That night he stayed out hours past the end of the seminar. When he did finally come in, he climbed quietly into bed next to her, his back to her. She pretended to sleep.

  The next morning he gave her medicine for her nausea and said barely a word. They made perfunctory appearances at the convention’s social functions and gave requisite performances as the newlywed couple from America.

  “We’re leaving on Friday,” he informed her on Wednesday. And so on their fourth day, the day the medical convention ended and their real honeymoon was to begin, the Lester-Allegros headed back to Los Angeles braced for the rudiments of married life altered from its storybook expectations.

  While Maggie unpacked suitcases and vanities in the bedroom of their Don Carlos Drive home she could hear the slight clang of ice cubes. He was downing his third Courvoisier.

  “I feel like a total fool,” he muttered between gulps while Maggie continued to unpack in silence. “My bride carrying some other niggah’s bastard.”

  “Please don’t use that word around me.”

  “Which word, ‘niggah’ or ‘bastard’?” And then he exploded, suddenly, out of nowhere. And he began to stalk her. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this!”

  With a smoldering of her own she pulled the delicate pieces of silk bed wear from the suitcase with a clawing anger that was the surrogate for words she wanted to unleash in her defense. No matter how stupid the words of explanation sounded as they tumbled inside her like caged animals, she wanted to get them out. She wanted to fight the constricting dry heave of logic that bullied her into silence, would not let her explain the confusion of it all—the irregularity of her menstrual cycle, the deaths, the accident, her total ill-regard for her physical being and her other circus reactions these past weeks while a baby took root inside her neglected body.

  He must have read the justification on her face, for in a sudden outburst edging on violence he yelled, “Bullshit!” And then again he yelled it. Again and again: “Bullshit! Bullshit!”

  And then she heard the glass, the cocktail glass, crashing against the wall. A second later he grabbed her and she was dizzied as he swung her around where they were now facing each other. She was the frightened, defiant child beauty. He was the stupefied ranting fool. She fought that sudden feeling of superiority that had reduced the scene to movie melodrama and felt a need to suppress a laugh. Then real fear overtook her as she was now assured that she was losing—had lost—her mind.

  “Were you in love with him?!?” he sneered as if he had discovered a new foul smell.

  Her eyes burned into him without waver—defiantly—and he suddenly shuttered as he held her tightly, unaware that her burning eyes were but the mask desperately formed to hide the madness and the confusion in her mind.

  Maggie wondered if indeed she did really love Sadikifu, or had she only loved his nobility, his grand-foolery, his anger, and his divine blackness that had turned her parents green with hate and fearful of losing their good “get-along” status. For it was truly his great pride in his blackness—his Africanness, his Negrocentricity—that had first so captured her, even if selfishly, that when she had listened spellbound to the passion and the subversion of his words and had rode buck wild his thick and throbbing manhood, she had felt all at once born gloriously anew.

  But did she love him? Truly love him?

  “Yes! Yes! YES!!! I LOVE HIM!!!” she lied mammishly.

  She gasped but did not flinch nor did she allow a single tear to fall when he grabbed his unpacked suitcase and ran out of the room.

  Maggie stood there frozen. She was cracked inside despite the rigidity of her outer frame, her fleshly armor. She stood there until she could no longer hear the roar of his car engine, until the sound had faded away like the sting that now suddenly made her flinch as if she had just been slapped upside her head, had faded away like the prospect of happiness in this new marriage.

  She then realized painfully the damage inflicted upon her relationship with her suddenly estranged Lamont. She knew that she had hurt him deeply, cut his manhood to the quick when she had proudly declared that she had loved another warrior from another world and time and for another reason. And she now knew that even as she spoke those words, had spit them in her new husband’s face, that she was unsure and regretful.

  Sadikifu was gone, yet the fondness that absence was alleged to cultivate had not taken root inside her heart. Not really. It had been blocked by guilt. The simpler man of smaller adventures who had just abandoned her in a state of fury and frustration at retroactive betrayal had now captured her heart’s imagination and her pity, and she suddenly loved him—or so she believed.

  A barrage of laughter burst forth from her baby-filled belly—belly laughs, deep, stupid, and sailor devilish—and she was now completely sure that she had lost, was losing, what was left of her simple-ass mind, and Lahti Simpson was chanting over and over again in her best colored voice, Be good to him, baby, be good to him. A good black man is hard to find—hard to find—be good to him, baby, be good to him. A good black man is hard to find—hard to find.

  It was Maggie’s mother’s voice, that good old colored Pearl Bailey voice from that good old colored past, from generations of slavery, docility, and watching her men being circumcised at the nuts while dangling from the tree of Emmett Till. Her mother’s voice haunted her throughout the long vigil that was her husband’s absence, a week to be exact.

  She knew that Sadikifu had not died in vain. No. He had died to give new life to proper pursuits. She felt grateful to him for what he had left, a legacy that permitted her to get a piece of the dream, to be a part of the fantasy, no matter how fucked up it was. She was positioned, in everyone’s eyes, correctly. She could live the hassle-free life as Mrs. Lamont Lester-Allegro, the doctor’s wife. And Sadikifu, neither his nobility nor his heir, could stand in the way of what his death had given her.

  Bullshit! Bullshit!

  She was confused for seven days, throughout the full term of her husband’s estrangement. She was confused and lost, torn between two ghosts, two teachers who had given their lessons and then moved on to other ground, away from her.

  Suddenly she
began to mourn the selfishness that her heart and mind aspired to in the name of weakness and despair. She became the good widow, just like Mamma Simpson had carefully taught her. And she was a good good widow, waiting for her dead husband to rise from the grave like Lazarus, like sweet Jesus on the third day. She would be waiting for him in her new Easter mind and she would ’fess up to her sins and beg for his forgiveness and seek salvation through him.

  Her mind was going, going, going…

  And so when finally, after seven days, Doctor Lamont Lester-Allegro returned to his damaged merchandise, she vowed to give the baby away and he swore to love her for the rest of his life.

  As weeks passed Maggie got bigger and bigger. The Baldwin Hills gentry, particularly Abner Lester-Allegro, was deliriously primed for a new Lester-Allegro heir. Lamont and Maggie knew an explanation would have to be concocted and carefully presented. Friends, family, and social acquaintances could not be allowed to feel cheated when told the smooth cover-up that Maggie had delivered prematurely and the baby had died.

  And so that’s how it went. The concerned were informed of the sad outcome through reports delivered from seclusion. The community was now allowed to mourn in their best Ward AME fashion the unseen corpse of the stillborn child. The item was covered in both the Church and Society sections of the L.A. Sentinel and received another two hundred words in Gertrude Gipson’s column. The lie had been so well played that even Maggie began to believe the death.

  But during the moments—and they were frequent—when she came to grips with the truth, she cried inside, privately mourned the loss of her baby, not to death, but to the discreet services of a highly reputable adoption agency in the South Bay Area.

  If only she had not asked to see him. If only Lamont had said no. But both of them were many, many things: a wife full of guilt, a mother-to-be, a woman; a physician with all the attendant compassion, a husband pained by his own inadequacies seen and not seen, a man.

  Lamont stood by quietly in the private delivery room of the small Palo Alto hospital while the unfamiliar but reputable small-town doctor, Rueben Alexander, who was unaware that Lamont himself was a doctor, supervised Maggie’s easy but difficult birth. Lamont’s emotional predicament caused him to silently heave in the process. Ambivalence battled the depths of despair and the heights of elation. And Maggie knew this. She could see it in him. She could see him breaking down and wanting to back away from the decision she had made for the both of them. She could see that small glimmer of hope in him: that they could keep the baby.