Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do

by Pearl Cleage

  Freeney saw my face change. “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing's wrong,” I said, “but I want to tell you something that has to stay just between us for now.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, getting up immediately to close the door into the hallway, although there is no random foot traffic in the archives. If you're not coming to see Freeney, you're not coming at all. “What is it?”

  “Son Davis has a child,” I said. “A boy about a year and a half old.”

  A strange expression flickered across his face. “How do you know?”

  “Someone sent Precious Hargrove a photograph and …,” I hesitated. How much did he need to know? “I met the baby's mother.”

  His eyes widened. “Oh, my! What are you going to do?”

  “I'm going to introduce him to his grandmother.”

  He jumped up suddenly, came over, and hugged me like I had just told him he was getting a big raise and twice as much staff as he used to have. “Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!”

  He just kept saying it over and over and hugging me. Miss Ross raised her head and gave us a baleful look for interrupting her nap, but Freeney paid her no mind.

  “Bless you! Bless you!”

  Finally, he calmed down and pulled himself together.

  “I take that to mean you think it's a good idea?”

  He sat down, but he was still practically bouncing off the seat. “I think it's a fabulous idea!”

  “But I haven't even told you how I'm going to do it yet.”

  “You're going to do it. That's what counts. This is just what I hoped would happen, and now it has!”

  What was he talking about? “What you hoped would happen when?”

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, then grinned at me, a little sheepishly, but no less delighted for that. “When I sent that picture to Senator Hargrove.”

  I almost fell out of my chair. “You sent it?”

  He nodded, folded his handkerchief neatly, and put it back in his pocket. His face was serious now. “I had no choice. I've kept too many secrets of my own.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since before you came,” he said. “I had just started going through the papers from his office, and I found that picture, of the three of them.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I knew immediately. I realized that he had secrets, and I can't keep secrets anymore. I pretended to be somebody else for years. Scared my family would find out I was gay. Scared I'd lose my job if my boss knew. Scared somebody would kick my ass. Scared somebody would call me a ‘faggot.’ And then I met Brady at an archivists conference in San Francisco, and it was love at first sight for both of us.”

  He blushed a little, but he wanted me to understand why he had done what he'd done. “He had never been in anybody's closet, and he showed me how good it felt to be free. He begged me to come out there and live, but I was still too scared, so I came back to Atlanta. Two years, he begged me to move, but I'd only visit, so finally he said, ‘If I have to move my black ass to Georgia to be with you, then that's what I'll do.' And he did. And he taught me to be myself and love myself and not give a damn what other people said.”

  Freeney's voice was fierce with determination. He took a minute to calm down, and then he looked at me. “One thing that made me respect Son Davis was that he wasn't scared to talk about homophobia. I respected him for speaking out. … So when I saw that picture and realized he had a secret life, too, I decided to honor the life he'd been hiding, for whatever reason he was hiding it. There's no good reason to pretend to be somebody you're not, but what could I do?”

  Miss Ross jumped into his lap, demanding attention, and he rubbed her throat gently. “So I sent the picture to Precious and hoped she'd know what to do with it so that child could claim his daddy, and she gave it to you!”

  Now it was my turn to grin. I hugged Freeney, being careful not to disturb Miss Ross. “Thank you for that,” I said, “Thank you for Son.”

  “He was a good man,” Freeney said. “He just didn't have time to make it right.”

  “Which is why we're going to help him,” I said, taking out the birthday video Madonna had given me. “Now here's what we're going to do. …”

  51

  PRECIOUS AND I HAD BEEN WORKING on her speech all afternoon. The story she told me about her initial encounter with Beth was a moving, first-person narrative, and I intended to open her statement with it and then segue into the rest of her remarks. It was almost seven o'clock by the time I left her house and started home. I hadn't heard from Blue for two days, but I wasn't worried. I knew he had work to do just like I did.

  I stopped in at the West End News to pick up a paper, and, when I came out, I bumped smack into Brandi, who was having her hair done next door. She stepped back, apologizing immediately.

  “Oh, I'm sorry! My bad! I just got so excited when I saw you!” She laughed and touched the side ofher hair. “I hope that fool didn't cut a plug out the way I jumped up so fast. She probably thought I had lost my mind.” Brandi stepped back, waved at her stylist through the window, and held up one finger to indicate she'd be right back.

  “Were you looking for me?” I asked, surprised at how much younger she looked without all the makeup.

  “I just wanted to say thanks, you know? For helping me and my cousin. Mr. Blue sent somebody to pick her and Junior up yesterday, and they are totally psyched about you inviting them to the big doin's this Sunday.”

  “Aren't you coming, too?”

  She looked embarrassed. “I can't go up there. Halfthem young niggas done seen my titties at one club or another. If they see me out and about, it might shake 'em up a little.”

  What she was saying reminded me of the scene in Gone With the Wind, where the town's most successful madam is trying to make a contribution to the war effort, and the proper slave-owning Confederate ladies refuse it on the grounds that her money is tainted. That always cracks me up. She earns her money with sex, and they earn their money breeding people, and her money's no good.

  “They need shaking up,” I said. “Please come. Madonna's probably going to need some moral support.”

  “You're right about that,” Brandi said. “She's already nervous as a cat!”

  All Brandi knew was that Madonna and her son had been invited. She didn't know they had agreed to play a major role in the proceedings.

  “Come as my guest,” I said, looking through the window at her stylist, who was watching our conversation with increasing exasperation. Time is money to a beautician. On Friday night, too? Brandi was playing a dangerous game keeping the woman waiting. If she wasn't careful, she was going to find herself facing the weekend with a half-done head.

  “Okay,” she said excitedly. “I'll be there. And can you do one thing for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell Mr. Blue thanks for putting that money in for the dancers.”

  She had lowered her voice conspiratorially, although there was nobody nearby.

  “What money?”

  She looked surprised. “He didn't tell you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I don't mean to be talkin' out of school, but I know it had to be him. Who else gonna think to do somethin' like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “When we got to work last night, there was a new guy there, a big guy, but real cool. Real polite and all, just like Mr. Blue.”

  I knew exactly who that was: Blue's combination driver, bodyguard, and special assistant. He never had much to say, but when he did, everybody listened.

  “He told us King James and DooDoo had sold their interest in the club and it would be closing for a couple of days. Then he apologized for any inconvenience to us—that's how he said it, too, any inconvenience to us— and gave us each an envelope with one thousand dollars in it!”

  “One thousand dollars each?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “Cash money! All twelve of us. Y
ou know how much that is altogether?”

  She laughed and shook her head in happy disbelief. Her stylist tapped a hairbrush against the glass and frowned.

  Brandi turned to me apologetically. “I gotta go before this girl goes off and starts on somebody else's head before she hooks me up. Thank Mr. Blue for me, will you? I don't know what we woulda done without him.” And she ducked back into the beauty shop.

  The neighborhood was humming with Friday night energy. Women were hurrying home with bags of groceries and holding hungry children by the hand. Men were stopping at the barbershop or the dry cleaner's. The line at the liquor store was still short enough to be jovial, and through the window of the florist shop, I could see a young man counting out the money for a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses.

  I smiled and started home with Brandi's words ringing in my ears. I don't know what we would have done without him. I do, I thought, and trust me, with him is better. Much better.

  52

  WHEN I TURNED DOWN OUR STREET, there were a few people out puttering in their yards, watering their azaleas, pruning their dogwoods. Some of the vegetable gardens were already showing tiny little tomato plants, the beginnings of blooms on the bell peppers, the fuzzy leaves of summer squash. I was admiring a line of pink dogwood trees in front of a house across the street when I heard the first tentative notes of our neighborhood saxophone player. He was still working on “My Favorite Things,” and he still wasn't giving the real Coltrane any serious competition, but this time, I could actually hear the melody beginning to emerge. He had slowed it down and found the fingering for at least every third or fourth note, and it was close enough so that I actually found myself singing along with him under my breath as I walked.

  “When the dog bites,

  When the bee stings,

  When I'm feeling sad,”

  Blue's voice joined me out of nowhere.

  “I simply remember my favorite things

  And then I don't feel so bad!”

  I turned around, and he was standing right beside me, smiling that smile and twinkling those beautiful, incongruous, otherworldly, past-life, ocean eyes. The dogwood trees were shedding their petals in a shower of four-pointed pink blossoms, the sky was lilac in the twilight, and Coltrane was taking a breather. The silence truly was golden.

  “Welcome home,” I said, smiling back at him, respecting the position he occupies around here and resisting the impulse to throw myself into his arms. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too,” Blue said, offering his arm.

  I took it, and we strolled on toward home as if there wasn't a big Lincoln creeping along a few feet behind us. “Everything okay?”

  His smile was genuine. “Everything's fine.”

  Coltrane began his second set, but it wasn't a tune either of us recognized, so we couldn't sing along.

  “I have a message for you,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows slightly.

  “Brandi asked me to tell you thanks.”

  I didn't have to say for what. We both knew she meant for creating a place where she could go to the twentyfour-hour salon and walk home safely at whatever hour. For creating a few city blocks where I can walk home alone in the twilight and allow myself to fall so deeply into the beauty of the moment that I don't even notice a man coming up behind me, and it's okay.

  “She said she didn't know what they would have done without you.”

  He smiled slowly as we turned up the front walk and his driver pulled the car into its usual spot at the curb. “And what did you say?”

  I stepped inside the blue door and turned to face him in the small foyer. “I said, ‘You don't have to worry about that. He's not going anywhere.’”

  He grinned and pulled me close. “You got that right,” he said. “You sure got that right.”

  53

  THE MORNING OF THE DEDICATION, I woke up in a panic at four a.m. What if I wasn't doing this for the right reasons? What if I was just trying to get back at Beth for her past sins against me, real or imagined? What if I wasn't being a friend to Son at all? What if I was just adding one more name to a list of imperfect black men who weren't who they pretended to be? What if I wasn't saving a damsel and slaying a dragon at all, but just adding to some mess somebody else was going to have to straighten out later?

  It didn't make any difference to me who ran for governor of Georgia anyway. I can't even vote here. All I came to do was make enough money to save my house, and now I'm about to lose a third of that by biting the hand that's supposed to feed me before Beth writes that final check. And how much do I really know about Blue Hamilton anyway?

  I tried to ease out of bed, but Blue was awake, too. He was always awake.

  “What's wrong?”

  “Just a little nervous about today,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  He was already up. “Want some coffee?”

  I hesitated.

  “Maybe a nice hot cup of sake?” he grinned.

  “You know I don't like sake.”

  “Coffee it is,” he said, kissing me as he headed for the kitchen.

  There's something so familiar to me about being up this early, leaning against the kitchen counter, waiting for the coffee to be ready so the serious business, whatever it might be, can be conducted before the rest of the world is even aware that the deal has been struck. My parents were always up early like this, plotting something with people who arrived after dark and left before the sun came up. I yawned and relaxed a little.

  “What's bothering you?” Blue set out two mugs.

  “I just hope I'm doing the right thing,” I said as the smell of coffee warmed up the small room.

  “What was your other option?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “When you start wondering if you did the right thing, what other choices do you think would have been better?”

  My mind ran through them, starting with I could have told Aunt Abbie to keep her postmenopausal visions to herself on through I could have told Precious politics wasn't my thing. I could also have told Blue I didn't believe in past lives and told Madonna her kid wasn't my responsibility. I could have pretended I didn't see DooDoo at the junior high school or King James driving away from the newsstand. Pretended I didn't see how scared Brandi was. Looked away from ShaRonda's torn stocking and turned off the birthday party video and taken Beth's check to the bank and my black ass home. But then who would I be?

  Blue was watching me with the mind-reading look on his face, so I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. He smiled and handed me a steaming mug of strong coffee.

  “You know you're doing the right thing.”

  “Do I?”

  “Pretending you don't know something when you do know it, and you know you know it, is as good a definition of crazy as I've ever heard, and you are … a lot of things—” he said that really slow to make me blush, and I obliged him “—but crazy is not among them.”

  I laughed. “Can we go to the beach if they don't arrest me?”

  He grinned at me. “We can go if they do arrest you. I'll post your bail.”

  “Good,” I said, suddenly feeling more sexy than scared. It was too early to get up. “You know what?”

  “What, baby?”

  “I have a few more questions to ask you about this past-life thing,” I said, standing up and heading back to the bedroom.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, setting down his coffee and falling in step beside me. “That's quite a coincidence.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I think I have a few more answers.”

  54

  THE MARTIN LUTHER KING CHAPEL dominates one end of the Morehouse College campus. Named in honor of the college's most famous graduate, the redcarpeted chapel seats a thousand people comfortably and is blessed with state-of-the-art audio-visual capabilities. The biographical piece that had made Beth weep when she saw the rough cut in that small conference room would be even more movi
ng on the giant screen that dominated the back of the stage.

  Freeney had ordered banks of white flowers for either side of the podium, where the dignitaries would stand to speak about Son's contributions to the college; his skill at fund-raising; his tireless mentoring; his anti-maleviolence workshops. The four people who would speak briefly, including Precious Hargrove, represented the broad range of Son's constituencies. After their remarks, the biographical video would be shown on the big screen, and Senator Hargrove would return to the stage to introduce Beth. That was what the program said anyway.

  Beth arrived with Jade in tow. Beth looked radiant and regal, wearing a dark purple tunic and pants, with a kente cloth shawl across her shoulders, and she greeted me with a smile that came from the heart. The auditorium was already filling up, and her eyes were shining with pride in Son's accomplishments and her own possibilities. I hoped this day would expand those possibilities and help her to embrace them.

  She pressed the final check for my services into my hand as we stood up front watching the crowd arriving. “I know I've told you this already, but I want you to know how much I appreciate the speech you did for today. Jade is learning, but there's something about the things you write for me. It's what I want to say, but better. It's my best self talking, and I like her.”

  “I know,” I said. “Me, too.”

  I slipped the check into my pocket, but, happy as I was to have it, I didn't have time to think about finishing up my business with the weasel right now. There was too much going on! The college president came over to say hello, and his wife needed a change in seating for one of the dignitaries, and the Glee Club had lost a soloist to laryngitis, and someone almost knocked over the scale model of the new Davis Communications Center, and Freeney had a last-minute attack of nerves that Brady addressed by walking him around the building and reminding him that getting fired wasn't the worst thing in the world because then they could move to San Francisco like they had some sense.

  Then Aretha came over to tell me that Madonna's mom had shown up after all and that Sonny Jr. was adorable and that they were all waiting in the holding room like I had asked them to do. Kwame escorted Precious to her seat in the front row beside Beth. Finally, Flora hurried in with Lu and ShaRonda. The newest resident of our building, ShaRonda had moved in with Flora after her uncle disappeared, and she was thriving. She saw me and waved, and I waved back.