Seen It All and Done the Rest

by Pearl Cleage

  “Mafeenie, things are different now. It’s not better or worse, it just is. You’re an artist. You have to be open to new ideas.”

  It’s worse, my old-fart brain said, but I held my tongue. She was trying to tell me something important if I could just listen to her.

  “Go on.”

  “What hasn’t changed is that people are still looking for stories, like you always told me they would. They’re just finding a lot of different ways to tell them, like you did when you were riding around Paris on that horse talking about the Amazon Queen. That was new and it worked great!”

  “There was a war on,” I said. “I had to do something to get people’s attention.”

  “There’s still a war on.”

  I couldn’t argue that, but I also didn’t see what that had to do with me talking about Miss Simpson and my childhood notebooks.

  “Have you talked to Miss Abbie about what she wants to call the gardens?”

  “Where did you see Abbie?” I said, glad for a change of subject.

  “Coming home this afternoon. She said you okayed doing a garden and we were going to call it the Martin Luther King Peace Garden Number One, but she couldn’t remember if she’d told you that yet.”

  I laughed. “She’s already named it and hasn’t planted the seed first.”

  “It’s a peace garden, Mafeenie, and she gave it a number. That means she expects there to be others.”

  “Other gardens?”

  “Of course. That’s the kind of stuff the Internet can do best. Give a bunch of people something to do that some other people are already doing. It makes them feel connected. Part of something. Abbie calling this garden ‘number one’ connects her to number two, which inspires number three, and on and on. Soon you got people all over the world planting gardens for peace because they saw you on our video planting sunflowers where Great-gram had her roses.”

  “She told you I vetoed the roses?”

  “Sunflowers will be fine,” Zora said.

  I looked at her. “You’re good at this.”

  She grinned at me. “Good enough for you to trust me?”

  “I do trust you, it’s just that this is a lot to ask of one little video of one little woman on one little corner.”

  She came over and plopped down on the couch and put her feet in my lap. “Listen, Mafeenie, you remember that Woodstock DVD we used to watch all the time?”

  Zora and I watched all the sixties classic concert films during one memorable summer when Howard threatened to abandon us if we didn’t stop playing the Jimi Hendrix version of “The Star Spangled Banner” every morning as loud as we could crank it up.

  “Of course,” I said, giving her a little foot massage.

  “You remember that guy who was singing the antiwar song where everybody was supposed to join in?”

  “Country Joe and the Fish,” I said, kneading the ball of her foot gently.

  “Yeah, and when people wouldn’t do it, he got mad and said, ‘Listen, you fuckers, you gotta sing better than that if you want to stop a war.’”

  “One of my favorite moments of the whole concert,” I said.

  “Well, this is sort of like that. People just aren’t singing loud enough and anything we can do to make them sing louder is a good thing.”

  “How long did you talk to Abbie?” I said, hearing the voice of the visionary coming through strong in the middle of a project that was supposed to be about getting a better price for a piece of real estate and now seemed to be about putting an end to war around the world.

  “Long enough for her to tell me she wanted to make a short statement on the video about the gardens before we start on Monday.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  Zora stretched her toes. “I told her absolutely.”

  “So I guess this means you’re the director?”

  “Yep,” she said, grinning. “Which means you have to do everything I say.”

  I grinned back. “You’re new at this, huh?”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Aretha brought T-shirts. We didn’t think she was coming since she had a few more doors to do, but when Zora and I pulled up bright and early Monday morning, she was standing in the yard talking to Victor, who was wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt that said RESCUE ON MLK in big red letters on the front. Aretha was wearing one, too.

  “I love it,” Zora said, pulling in behind Aretha’s truck and grabbing her little black bag of technology. She had tried to explain it to me a couple of times, but I was hopeless, so she gave me permission not to understand how she did it as long as I approved of what she was doing. I got out of the car and waved at my assembling crew members. The only person not here yet was Abbie and she had called to say she was on her way.

  “Good morning,” Aretha said, giving Zora a hug and handing each of us a T-shirt. Victor stepped back a little and looked at Zora since they hadn’t been properly introduced yet. “I think a crew works better when it looks like a crew.”

  “Me too,” I said, plucking a T-shirt from the pile she was offering. “These are great! I’m a sucker for a good costume.”

  Zora pulled hers over the T-shirt she was already wearing and walked over to Victor. “I’m Zora Evans, Josephine’s granddaughter. Are you Victor?”

  “Yeah. Victor Causey.”

  She stuck out her hand and he looked over at me before he reached out to shake it. I realized that he had found a way to shave and removed the scraggly beard he had been sporting the other day. I smiled my approval.

  “Thanks for working with us on this,” Zora said. “This house means a lot to me.”

  “Not enough to live in it,” he said, still a little surly, even in his crew T-shirt.

  “Not yet,” Zora said.

  Before I could tell her she didn’t have to take any guff from Victor, Abbie pulled up in her little Volvo and tooted the horn like we might miss her. Victor sighed and sat down on the back porch steps. His quiet sanctuary had suddenly become a veritable beehive of noisy new arrivals, high expectations, and brand-new T-shirts. Zora sat down beside him and unzipped her bag.

  “Am I late?” Abbie had on bright yellow sweats and a pair of red rubber boots.

  “Of course not,” I said, glad for her familiar smell as she reached out to hug me.

  “Who did the T-shirts?”

  “I did,” Aretha said, handing her one, which she immediately pulled on just like Zora and I had done. We had all just added the T-shirts on top of whatever layers we were already wearing, so now we looked a little lumpy, but it didn’t matter. Aretha was right. We were now officially a crew. It was time to get started.

  FORTY

  The five of us gathered on the lawn, surrounded by the job that lay ahead of us. This was our crew: me, Zora, Aretha, Abbie, and Victor. The first thing I did was say a brief welcome and thank them for agreeing to help. Victor was getting paid, but I thanked him anyway. Zora had already gotten everybody’s permission to videotape any- and everything. Everybody except Victor, who objected vehemently until I suddenly had a flash of inspiration and offered him another twenty-five dollars a week. Zora promised to keep him off camera as much as possible. He still grumbled, but he agreed. I had made peace with the whole reality idea by informing Zora that I didn’t care how much footage she shot of me, I didn’t want to see any more pictures of myself doing whatever this was we were doing. All it did was make me feel self-conscious. She kept telling me how great I looked and sounded, but I was adamant, so she finally agreed.

  “It’s important that we tell the story not just of this house,” I said.

  “But of this moment.”

  They all nodded, except Victor, who rolled his eyes.

  I looked over at Abbie. “Did you want to say something about the garden?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Zora, who had been standing next to her, checked the technology and nodded.

  “Okay,” Abbie said, smiling at all of us, but talking to that unseen
audience Zora had assured us would be watching too. “I’m not going to make a speech or anything. I just want to say that a lot of you may not think of yourselves as gardeners, but your country is at war. You have to do some things you might not do otherwise, just because it is your country, too. The first thing is, you have to love it, the essence of it, the goodness of it, not the people we have allowed to call themselves our leaders, but the country itself. We have to help each other the way good people always help each other. The same way good people always know when something is wrong because you can always tell if you’re really looking.” She stopped and looked at Zora and frowned slightly. “What was I talking about?”

  The mysterious, private unknowable nature of human beings, I thought. Of course Abbie and I were still friends. We were still doing the same work.

  “Loving your country,” Zora said softly.

  “Yes!” Abbie said, pleased to be reminded. “Of course. We have to find a way to do whatever it takes to reclaim our country. And it doesn’t have to be something big. It can be something that seems small. Something that helps you remember the good things. Focus on your neighbors. Focus on the mountains behind your house. Focus on any grandbaby you can find. Focus on music you sing with other people. Focus on growing something. That’s why we’re making a garden here and that’s why we’re going to call it the Martin Luther King Peace Garden Number One. Because if we can grow sunflowers on Martin Luther King Drive, maybe we can grow sunflowers in Baghdad, too.”

  “And Fallujah,” Aretha said.

  “And Kabul,” Zora said, behind the camera.

  “And New Orleans,” I said, for Louie.

  Victor didn’t say anything, but he didn’t roll his eyes either.

  “Anything else?” Zora said.

  Abbie shook her head and smiled. “No. I think that’s it for now.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then let’s get to work.”

  FORTY-ONE

  By the end of the day, we were almost too tired to take Louie up on his offer to feed us. Almost. Aretha had plans with her daughter and Victor brushed off our invitation before I could fully extend it, but Zora and I went home to shower and change before Abbie picked us up at just before eight. It had been a long day’s work, but we had already made a visible dent and that was enough to satisfy me.

  It was going to be a big job, even with all of our hands working, but we had a plan to keep us on track. Aretha had worked out a schedule of what needed to be done in what order so we wouldn’t be doing drywall before the electrician finished. But all of that came later. Today, all we had done was bag and re-bag trash, inside and out, load up Aretha’s truck and let her haul it to the dump. Abbie and I worked outside and Victor and Zora worked inside.

  By six o’clock, we were all exhausted. The water wasn’t on yet and I worried about where Victor would go to clean up, but I knew better than to ask him. I got the feeling his pride was all he had to call his own and anything that threatened it touched off some serious alarms. He and Zora seemed to get along fine. They tossed enough trash out of that house to fill two loads on Aretha’s truck all by themselves.

  Louie lived on the second floor of a well-kept four-unit building on Ashby Street, and we pulled into the driveway as we had been instructed to do. As soon as we stepped out of the car, we could hear zydeco music coming from an upstairs window, along with the aroma of something that made me know how hungry I was. Zora found Louie’s name on the mailbox, and we rang the bell. He buzzed us in without requiring any verbal ID and stood smiling at the top of the steps, holding a wooden spoon and wearing a big white apron. The sounds of zydeco king Clifton Chenier were pouring out of the door behind him.

  “Ladies,” he said, “welcome, welcome, welcome!”

  We followed him into his apartment, which was so small, the four of us seemed to fill up the place like a party when everybody arrives at the same moment. Or maybe it was just the music. Or the smells wafting in from the kitchen. Louie’s place was offering the two things New Orleans is known for—good music and good food.

  I introduced Zora and thanked him for having us.

  “Thanks for doing me this favor,” he said to me when Abbie had stepped into the small bedroom to return a call from Peachy. Louie had just spoken to him and conveyed Peachy’s apologies that he couldn’t get away from the restaurant to join us. Zora was in the living room, dancing by herself, and Louie was moving around in the cramped kitchen with a grace that was almost as sensual as the smell of food. It was like watching a really good dancer. I sipped the champagne he had offered and enjoyed the show. He was dishing out steaming bowls of gumbo and cutting huge hunks of steaming corn bread that had been cooked in the skillet the old-fashioned way. There was also a big pot full of steamed shrimp and crayfish, a pan of blackened catfish, another of jambalaya, and one more pot of red beans which I was sure would provide the perfect topping for the fluffy white rice he had just removed from the heat.

  I surveyed the feast and my stomach growled again. No way Louie’s chef could resist this offering. If he liked good food, this probably made him weep.

  “So how many of these fabulous dishes will we now be seeing on the menu at that hotshot hotel you work for?”

  Louie carried two bowls of gumbo over to the tiny kitchen table. “None of these made the cut, Miss Josephine.”

  “None of them?” Impossible.

  “Not a single one.” He set the other two bowls down and put the plate of corn bread in the center of the table. “That’s why this is really kind of a celebration.”

  “I’m all for that,” I said. “What are we celebrating?”

  He looked at me and untied his apron. “I quit.”

  “You quit your job?” I was surprised. He had told me at Abbie’s that Atlanta had a surfeit of good chefs and that he was lucky to have found a position, even if it was less than perfect.

  “The thing is, cooking’s not just a job to me,” he said. “It means something. How it looks, how it smells, how it tastes. How people feel when they eat it. All that matters to me.”

  “I can see that,” I said, smiling at the beautiful table he had laid out for us.

  He smiled back. “I’ve given up just about everything else I can think of already. This is the one thing I figure I gotta keep doing the way it’s supposed to be done or I’m not what I say I am.”

  Zora’s dance must have come to an end at the same time Peachy and Abbie said their goodbyes because before I could say another word, both my crew members suddenly poked their heads around the door, their noses quivering like rabbits’.

  “Anything we can do to help?” Zora said. Abbie was grinning at me over Zora’s shoulder.

  “You can sit down and eat this food,” Louie said, pulling out a chair for her with one hand and one for Abbie with the other.

  “Peachy’s sorry he can’t be here,” Abbie said. “He said to tell you, and I quote, ‘If you have enough time to cook for us, you could be down there cooking for him.’”

  Louie laughed, pulled out another chair for me, and sat down, too. “Duly noted,” he said, reaching for my hand and Zora’s on his other side. We lowered our heads.

  “Bless this food,” Louie said, “and these friends who come to share it. Amen.”

  “Amen,” we all said, glad Louie hadn’t felt the need for a longer communication with the Almighty. The food he had put before us was a beautiful, aromatic distraction and we were only human. We helped ourselves to the corn bread and picked up our oversize gumbo spoons. After that, there wasn’t much conversation for a while. Not that we didn’t have anything to say. Just that it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.

  FORTY-TWO

  I like him,” Zora said, after Abbie dropped us off and we had taken our showers and climbed into bed together in my room for what had become our nightly ritual.

  “Me too,” I said. “He’s been through a lot.”

  “Abbie told me,” she said, snuggling down a little deeper into the pill
ows. “He didn’t seem to be too upset about quitting his job.”

  “They don’t deserve him.”

  “Maybe he’ll come and work with us.”

  The idea hadn’t occurred to me. “As a chef?”

  Zora giggled. “We can’t afford a chef yet, Mafeenie.”

  I loved that “yet.” Showed confidence, always a big part of projects like this. Faith was a big help, too.

  “Well, what did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he can be a part of our crew,” she said. “Abbie said he told her he used to have a big garden behind his restaurant. He grew everything on the menu.”

  “Did he ever grow any sunflowers?”

  “I think they grow wild in New Orleans,” she said, yawning.

  “Everything grows wild in New Orleans,” I said, pulling the spread up around her.

  “Even Louie?”

  “I’m sure he had his moments,” I said. “Are you sleeping in here tonight?”

  “Can I?” She was half asleep already.

  “Of course.” I leaned down to kiss her goodnight.

  She was asleep before I had a chance to turn out the light, but I just lay there for a minute trying to imagine what Louie being wild might look like. By the time I dozed off, I wasn’t any closer, but the next morning, I remembered the sound of zydeco in my dreams. Old habits are hard to break.

  FORTY-THREE

  On Wednesday, our crew expanded by one. Aretha and Zora were trying to finish up the last of the blue front doors, so another pair of hands was right on time. Abbie and Victor and I were raking up the endless detritus that still cluttered the front yard when I glanced up and saw Louie getting off the bus at the bottom of the hill. He was wearing jeans, an army jacket, work boots, and a cap. He was carrying a bigger version of the red cooler in Victor’s room, which he had reached back into the bus to retrieve.