Seen It All and Done the Rest

by Pearl Cleage

  “About that and about what was happening to people in New Orleans. About the war. About kids like the ones who broke in on me. Everything seemed to be falling apart at the same time and everything I thought I could do about it seemed too little, too late. Once I went to Tybee, I got so I didn’t want to leave the island at all. I was too afraid of what I’d find out there, roaming around waiting for me. I told Peachy I was afraid I’d lost something important and he said maybe we ought to take a trip and see if we could find it.”

  Of course she wanted to marry him.

  “So we just hit the road, like I told you. No destination. No agenda. No timetables. We were just riding through America. One night, it was about seven o’clock and we’d been traveling all day. I was tired so Peachy pulled off at this tiny motel right outside of Amarillo. We took our suitcases in and found a little Mexican restaurant a block away full of big families and first dates and friendly waiters who spoke English to us and Spanish to each other. We ordered two margaritas and laughed and talked our way through some of the best fajitas I ever had in my life. Nobody was arguing or fussing about politics or minding anybody else’s business. It was just people, out in the middle of Texas, being people. Together.

  “It was sunset when we left the place, and as we walked back to the motel, the sky was turning the most amazing shade of purple. I still had the sound of those happy people in my head, so I took Peachy’s hand and we just stood there at the edge of the parking lot and watched the sun go down. That’s when I felt the connection. Not just to Peachy, but to something bigger than just him and me. Something about the idea of what a country like this could be if people could figure out a way to just be people.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “Go on,” I said, wondering if that was what it felt like to be a real American. “I’m with you.”

  “I think that connection was what I was looking for,” she said. “And the weird thing is, that great big feeling brought me back to something much, much smaller. It brought me to Tybee and West End and now to your garden because I realized that you can only be a good citizen one step at a time. That’s all I have to do. Tending my little corner of America is all there is to it. If I want to stop the war, the first thing I have to do is make sure nobody’s fighting at my house. And you have to make sure nobody’s fighting at your house and on and on and on…”

  She sounded like Zora, optimistic and determined. A hard combination to beat, even if you want to, which I didn’t. I couldn’t argue with the idea of cleaning up your own backyard, but there was one problem. In the movies, once the idealist states his case, John Wayne rides in with a great big gun to make it stick. Could it work without that?

  “The other thing about the bad guys,” Abbie said, “is that they’re always outnumbered by the good guys. No western worth its salt omits the scene where the people, energized by the one who stepped forward to protect them in the first place, rise up and stand together to save their town.”

  “You think that’s going to happen this time?”

  “It happens every time,” she said.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do until they get themselves together?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, grinning at me across the table. “Put on a strapless dress. Sing something.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  When we told Zora about the tour, she was beside herself.

  “That’s a great idea,” she said. “We’ve gotten so many hits since the fire. I’ve just been showing the burned-out shell, no statement from you or anything, and people are going crazy. They want to do something!”

  Abbie just smiled.

  “Then I guess we ought to let them,” I said, surrendering.

  “It’s time for you to make a statement.”

  “A statement about what?”

  “About what happened,” Zora said, glancing at her watch. “Let’s do it now. I can get it on tonight at our regular time.”

  “Regular time for what?”

  “Live?” Abbie said.

  Zora nodded. “If we hurry. Come on, Mafeenie. I’ll explain on the way.”

  “Do I need to change?” I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, our crew uniform that had become my new outfit of choice.

  “It’s perfect,” Abbie said.

  The three of us drove over together. I was thinking about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Talking to Zora about freedom and talking to Abbie about connections made me feel good. It didn’t make me stop worrying about our finances or feeling bad about the loss of the house, but it made the struggle we were in a bigger one. Even if Greer Woodruff never had to answer for her role in any of it, even if we couldn’t prove it, our continued presence there would thwart her plans without a need to call her name. And for all those people who seemed to be watching, it would give them a visual image of our little group doing what free people always have to do if they’re going to stay free: fight for it.

  Zora had been posting live feeds twice a week, sometimes new video, sometimes just her assessment of what was going on. Because of my self-imposed prohibition on looking at what she was doing, I had never seen it and was only vaguely aware that it had taken on a life of its own. Abbie said people all over town made it a point to be there for the live feeds to see what she had to say.

  When we got to the property, I jumped out and went to stand in front of where my house used to be. Zora turned her little camera in my direction, and I tried to imagine how many people could see me standing there with just a click. I looked out into their collective eyes.

  “We had a fire here last week,” I said. “I think somebody set it. Somebody who decided this house didn’t need to be here. That whatever this house represented doesn’t need to be represented here. Whatever this garden represented doesn’t need to be represented here. That this neighborhood doesn’t need to even be here. Well, they’re wrong. We live right here because we want to, and we won’t be run off. We’re going to put another house here, and another garden, and every time they burn it down, we’re going to put it right back.”

  Okay. I needed to wrap it up. I took a deep breath. “We all know there are people who don’t want us to reclaim this community,” I said. “People who have made deals that they think are more important than our lives. People who think a neighborhood can be bought and sold to the highest bidder. People who think money can buy everything, and when it can’t, the strong one gets to take it anyway because nobody can tell her no.”

  I said her just so Greer Woodruff would know I was talking about her.

  “But it doesn’t have to be that way. Not if enough people who know what’s wrong will stand up whenever they see it and say no, as loud as they can every chance they get.”

  I was channeling Tom Joad’s speech at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. I wondered if anybody watching me had read it or seen the movie. Probably not. I was as close as they were going to get to that kind of determined idealism.

  “Because America isn’t some big, weird, abstract thing. It’s just us. And we love this house, and this garden, and we’re going to find a way to live on it in peace because…that’s what citizens do.”

  I said that for Abbie because I knew she would appreciate it and because I finally understood what she meant.

  “The rebuilding,” I said, “starts now.”

  Zora was nodding and smiling, and I didn’t have on a strapless dress, but it was definitely time to sing something. I had just the song. Everybody knows it and everybody feels better when they sing it.

  “This little light of mine,” I sang. “I’m gonna let it shine.” My voice sounded stronger than I thought it would, so I sang a little louder. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”

  From where she was standing next to Zora, Abbie joined in, too.

  “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”

  We sang the whole song twice and then Zora turned off the camera a
nd we sang it again just for the three of us. It’s that kind of song.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  I made the cover of Dig It! The story was entitled “Burned Out Actress Vows to Rebuild.” The headline wasn’t clear about whether the burned-out part referred to me or the house, but the story was breathlessly supportive in its coverage, so I couldn’t complain. Abbie and Zora were busy putting together an itinerary for what they were now calling The Sea to Shining Sea MLK Rescue Tour, which would start in Tybee and end in San Francisco. Aretha had managed to talk the T-shirt company into donating a bunch of shirts, and I realized I was becoming a community spokeswoman by default.

  I studied the cover of Dig It! for a long time. There I was in a still they had taken from Zora’s video at the house the other night, looking serious as hell. I had my eyes closed and my head thrown back, singing “This Little Light of Mine” for all I was worth. It was very sixties, warm and fuzzy, but I knew anybody who was serious enough to burn down a building to get what they wanted wasn’t going to be put off by a few freedom songs. We hadn’t heard anything from Greer Woodruff since the fire. I was waiting for that other shoe to fall.

  I wasn’t the only one waiting. Greer’s associate Duncan Matthews was waiting, too, and he was afraid to wait any longer. He wouldn’t have presumed to call, he said, after I assured him I remembered our first meeting during one of my early visits to Woodruff and Associates, unless he had some information he thought I needed right away. When I told him to meet me at four and he said the sooner, the better, I knew he wasn’t kidding.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  We met at Soul Vegetarian. Once we sat down and ordered iced tea, Duncan Matthews said he didn’t know where to begin.

  “Start anywhere,” I said. “I’ll keep up.”

  “It’s not her fault,” he said.

  “Sure it is.”

  He was miserable. During all those performances he had seen of Medea, he never for an instant thought he’d be sitting across the table from me like this, but here we sat at Soul Veg, a tiny restaurant for vegans and those who love them. No chance either one of us was going to run into anybody we knew in here. We took a table near the back, surrounded by the smell of grilled tofu and broccoli quiche.

  “May I speak frankly?”

  “Please.”

  He sighed like he was already exhausted by the effort to get through these next few minutes, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small silver disk. I recognized one of the tools of Zora’s technology. Duncan was holding it gingerly between two fingers.

  “You know how easy it was for you to get those pictures of your house out on the Web?”

  “My granddaughter does all of that,” I said. “I never even look at the footage.”

  “Well, you’ll want to take a look at this,” he said, and handed me the disk.

  I turned it over and saw that the word Birmingham was printed on the front side.

  “It can go out just as easy.”

  “What is it?”

  He fiddled with his water glass. His herb iced tea was untouched. “Did your granddaughter go to Birmingham with a couple of guys a month or so ago?”

  The way he said it sounded nasty. A couple of guys.

  “She went to a wedding.”

  “They had a party,” he said. “From the looks of it, things got pretty wild. Out of control, maybe?”

  Zora’s whispered confession came creeping back into my head: I want to tell you what happened in Birmingham.

  “What’s that got to do with you?”

  “The thing is, it has to do with you,” he said. “Somebody at that party shot some video. Of your granddaughter.”

  My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest. I closed my hand around the disk as if I could obliterate it if I just squeezed hard enough. I looked at Duncan. “Is that what’s on this thing?”

  “It’s a copy,” he said. “She has the original.”

  There was no reason to be more specific. We both knew who he was talking about.

  “And what does she intend to do with it?”

  “Your granddaughter’s pretty well known because of the project you’ve been doing. All the coverage she’s gotten. And then all that other stuff that happened last year, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, that video in your hand will fly around the Web. If it got out.”

  My first reaction was to see if my drink-in-the-face throwing skills had eroded due to lack of recent practice, but I knew this was no time for theatrical gestures. This was Zora’s worst nightmare. An insane moment that you somehow manage to stumble out of and survive, suddenly blasted around the world for all to see, judge, discuss, dissect, and commit to memory. If Zora had been freaked out by all the coverage she got in Dig It!, this would be more than she could take. And for what?

  “My granddaughter doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “I know, I know…,” he said, his voice trailing off. He sighed again. “Look, Ms. Evans, I hate being the one she asked to do this, but in a way I’m glad because I admire you so much as an artist and as a person.”

  I cut him off. “Then why are you involved in this?”

  “Because it’s not just her. We all need to do this deal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He looked around furtively. There were only a few other people in the place, absorbed in their conversations and their dinners. Satisfied that we were not being eavesdropped upon, he still leaned closer. I did, too.

  “Last year, when that police scandal exposed a lot of the cocaine connections in this town, everybody went underground. All of the ways they’d been laundering their money dried up or were under such close scrutiny that nobody could do any real business.”

  He said it like he was talking about General Motors and Chrysler.

  “Some of us were having problems at that time due to fluctuations in the real estate market, some bad investments, things that didn’t work out the way we hoped they would.” He gave what I guess he thought was an ingratiating smile. “Atlanta is a very volatile market, I don’t know if you know that.”

  I just looked at him. I was not interested in a seminar on the buying and selling of property in this city. I was interested in why any of this was happening.

  “So Greer had the idea of approaching some of these guys…”

  “The cocaine dealers?”

  “Yes, well, not the street guys. The other ones. The ones who handle the real business of it.”

  I remembered the men I’d seen with Duncan in Greer’s office that first day. Were those the guys who had burned my house?

  “I don’t know how she even knew who these guys were, but she made them a proposition where we could wash a lot of cash for them if they would let us use their money while we were holding it to clear up some of our own problems. They said they didn’t care what we did with it as long as we had it ready when they needed it back. Greer told them that wasn’t a problem because she had some deals working that would take care of everything in plenty of time.”

  He took a swallow of his water and ran his hand over his hair nervously. “So she asked some of us to come in with her and it sounded like a good solution all the way around—and it could have been. But we thought it was going to be a three- or four-year thing, you know nothing happens fast in this business, but they got their network back together faster than that, and now they want their money.”

  If Greer Woodruff didn’t have any better sense than to go into business with cocaine dealers, the men weren’t keeping her out because she was a woman. They were keeping her out because she didn’t have good sense.

  “How much money does she owe?”

  “Well, it’s really all of us together, but the deal for this corner would be enough to put everything right. She figured you’d be willing to sell cheap when your place stopped generating any income, and the others weren’t going to be able to hold out much longer. But when you came back and then you wo
uldn’t sell, that presented a real problem, you see, because we don’t have anything else in the works. This is pretty much it if we’re going to fit within their time frame.”

  “Why don’t you just pay the dope dealers the money she keeps offering us?”

  He squirmed uncomfortably when I said “dope dealers.” “The debt is a little more than that.”

  How big a fool was she? “How much more?”

  He looked around again. “Three million,” he whispered.

  “Three million dollars?” Who borrowed three million dollars from gangsters and hoped for the best? Didn’t these people ever go to the movies?

  “I know it sounds like a lot, but this one deal that you, Ms. Evans, have been holding up will clear everything. Our share is five million. That takes care of our partners and puts all of us back in the black.”

  He looked at me and had the nerve to smile like I would share his relief that there was a plan on the table by which his company could be saved at the expense of my granddaughter’s reputation and her inheritance.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said, knowing a deal like this required shamelessness as one of its key components.

  “I am,” he said, wiping the smile off his face. “I am deeply, deeply ashamed, but these guys are losing patience with us and we need to close this deal right away. We’re out of time. You have to name a price.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  He clasped and unclasped his hands nervously. “Ms. Evans, your granddaughter is a very beautiful young woman. She’s at the beginning of her life, probably has a bright future, but if this video hits the Web, that will be the defining moment of her life. It will be like Paris Hilton’s sex video or Monica Lewinsky’s dress. No one will ever meet her without remembering it. They’ll remember how shocked they were.” He looked at me. “Or how turned on.”

  I stood up and he did, too. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize.”

  Several of the other patrons in the restaurant glanced our way.