ONE
Chicago, 1968
Just how good was the good life for us over there in Africa? It kind of makes you wonder.
Long before there was a South Side of Chicago, I mean. Long before the Afro pick or the Negro spiritual or George Wallace. Before the martyred students at the lunch counters and under the quicklime. Before heroin and tap dancing, before the Harlem Renaissance and before the nightmare of the real Gone with the Wind.
To hear the poets tell it, we were all kings and princes. But I don’t think I was. I think I was an ordinary Joe—make that Jill, as I am a girl—and I was probably just as fucked up and out of it as I am today.
But what’s the use of that kind of speculation? The point is, they came and got us. Royal lineage or no, it was the cotton patch, the missy’s kitchen, and the massah’s bed.
And so the slave called Solomon Lisle begat the one called Edmond who begat Arthur who begat Harold and Leland—and oh, there was an awful lot of that going on over the course of some two hundred years. Ultimately, in the American belle epoque, my great-uncle Woody was begat.
Most of the Lisle men sired offspring at will. Woody’s lovely wife Ivy wanted babies so much, she did everything short of visiting a witch doctor. They tried and tried, but she was unable to have children. Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes. They wound up with me.
Despite that little joke that fate played on them, they nourished and loved me, and now I’m almost twenty. They even pop for most of my tuition at Debs College, where I’m an English major, making me the inadvertent token in that august department.
Debs College looks more like an office building than a university. Situated in the middle of the Loop, its campus is the whole of downtown Chicago, and for a quad we have the splendor of Grant Park, as commodious a place to sit and think as any that I could imagine.
So why in hell am I in the underlit, smoke-laden student hangout bar, whimsically named the Yacht Club, making lists on a paper napkin of the names of Woody’s forebears?
I’m half drunk and I’m stalling, that’s why. I have to go and see a goodly number of the clan at the annual Lisle family gala, being held tonight at the Parkway Inn. I’m already forty minutes late.
Hard to believe: MLK is eight days dead. And here I am on a barstool trying to recall the names of some distant cousins who live in Joliet. It seems so strange. But then, everything has taken on a kind of unreality since they murdered Dr. King.
My friend Bobby Vaughan came in and took the stool next to mine.
“Hey, Cassandra.”
“Hey. I couldn’t get a booth,” I said. “It’s packed in here tonight.”
The Yacht Club was in fact crowded every Friday evening. In addition to the usual mix of customers, downtown office workers tended to come in on Friday to celebrate week’s end with communal pizzas and too much to drink.
Bobby ordered a beer.
“How come you’re here, Vaughan? No hot date on a Friday night? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I’m getting together with somebody—later.”
“That’s more like it. A midnight rendezvous. Have fun.”
He laughed indulgently. “Don’t get carried away, Cassandra. We going to a movie at seven-thirty. Seven-thirty ain’t midnight.”
As unlikely as it was, Bobby was my closest friend, emphasis on friend. Not that I wasn’t happy with that—I was, I loved him—but sometimes I let myself wonder if he’d ever look at me in a different way. I told myself all the time: if you were normal, he might. If you weren’t so goddamn odd looking, he might one day look at you the way he looks at the girls he sleeps with.
I should say “the sisters” he sleeps with, shouldn’t I? Except I knew more about Bobby Vaughan than he thought I knew. His sex life was not limited to black women, no matter how quiet he kept that.
I had no business wondering about that stuff, though. Bobby was tall and strong and as handsome as the wild chestnut mount in a girl’s illustrated story book. He attracted more female attention than he could have handled in three lifetimes.
I never had that kind of problem. Men have a habit of looking right through me. I’m carrying about twenty pounds more than I need. I’m not ugly, exactly, but I have a face devoid of any lovely planes or angles and my red hair, which I wear in a fat braid down my back, is neither kinky nor romantically curly; it is simply unruly. Nearsighted, I wear rimless spectacles, which, thanks partly to John Lennon, have become fashionable. I remember looking over at another student one day during chemistry class. He was drawing caricatures of various people in the room, including the professor, an almost freakishly tall young white man the students had nicknamed Bird Boy. I was featured on the sketch pad as well, as a barn owl.
“You know how many names I have so far?” I asked Bobby.
“Names?”
“Sixty-seven.”
“Sixty-seven what?”
“Names, Bobby! Are you listening or not? Aunts, grandparents, cousins, in-laws, whatever. Any relative I can remember ever meeting.”
“Damn, Cassandra. You really are crazy, you know that? What the fuck are you doing that for?”
“Think about it,” I said. “I’ve only mentioned it six or seven hundred times.”
“Oh yeah. Right. You got that reunion thing coming up.”
I ordered another beer, drank it quickly.
And then I erupted. “Jesus Christ! He’s barely in the grave. Why the fuck does this show have to go on? Who cares about a stupid family reunion now? I wish they had burned down the fucking Parkway Inn.”
“Take it easy, girl. My family can be a drag, too. But I don’t hate them.”
“I didn’t say I hated them, did I? I don’t hate them, I hate everybody.”
My tears came in a sudden torrent. Uncontrollable, wrenching sobs. People were staring. Oh Jesus, were they staring. What did they think? I knew I was humiliating Bobby, but I couldn’t help myself. I hurt.
He sat there speechless as a brick. He’s never going to forgive me, I thought. But then he reached over and pulled some paper napkins from the dispenser and handed them to me.
In another moment I quieted. Then I attempted to apologize to him, “Sorry. I’m so sorry. Must be some kind of delayed reaction.” My voice was so low I’m sure he didn’t hear a word.
“It’s okay. You’re okay now,” he said at last. “Get another beer and drink it slow.”
“No, no, I can’t. I have to go. I’ve got snot on my face, right?”
“You do not, girl. Go on ahead. I’ll see you later.”
I climbed down from the bar stool and was out of there like a shot. I didn’t even say so long.
I caught the southbound “B,” the Jackson Park line, at the Harrison Station. Those scary electric sparks popped beneath the wheels of the car, flared up, and burned out like fireflies. I used the train’s greasy window as a mirror. I double-checked the snot situation and then put on a little of the lipstick I’d been carrying in my purse since tenth grade.
Besides the weight and the glasses and the long-out-of-date shade of lipstick, I am going on twenty and I’m still a virgin. It makes me sick.
The train emerged from the tunnel onto the blackened elevated tracks that cut through the South Side, straight on to the Jackson Park terminus. End of the line, no joke. I often tried to imagine the scraggly area as the glorious pavilion it had been in 1893, at the World Columbian Fair. They called it the White City, which amused me no end.
The el snaked along past old buildings with blown-out windows, leaning into the rusty curves like an old speed skater. One day, I always thought, one day this goddamn train is going to fall and I’m going down with it. I’d have given anything to be back in the Yacht Club with Bobby rather than heading to the family party.
I had been in the Yacht Club last week, too—the day after King was assassinated. Usually that dive pulsed from ten a.m. to closing with students, teachers, shoppers, and blue-collar drunks. But that afternoon, the day after the murder, Bobby and I were two of only a handful of patrons. We sat next to each other, talking low, not talking at all, swallowing tears and no-name brown ale.
“Martin was no longer effective,” Bobby pronounced. “But that didn’t stop him from being beautiful. He was still beautiful.”
I nodded.
Somebody, clinging to the shadows in one of the booths at the rear, kept feeding coins into the jukebox. Over and over, they played the same two songs—“The Midnight Hour” and “Ode to Billy Joe.”
Whenever I felt I had no place else to go, I set out for the college. Bobby and I had decided, independent of each other, to come to school that day. It was as if everybody else knew instinctively to stay behind closed doors. Ivy and Woody were sitting numbly in their bedroom with the TV on when I slipped out.
That April day had been pleasantly bright and quiet, like the end of the world. I rode downtown virtually alone on the Michigan Avenue bus. No traffic. Stores shuttered. The occasional passerby with a death mask for a face. Doom in the air.
The corridors of the college were deserted; all classes canceled, said the handwritten note on the main entrance. I stood in the deserted lobby feeling, and I knew, looking, utterly lost. I sent up a prayer of thanks when Bobby appeared on the stairs. He looked sleepless, unwashed. Without speaking, we left the building and turned into the Yacht Club next door. One pitcher of beer after another. One cigarette after another. We made bitter jokes and used the ugliest curse words we knew. We stayed in the bar drinking all day and into the night.
If the novels and movies hadn’t been lying to me, Bobby and I were supposed to spend that night together. Both of us hurt and furious, paralyzed and mourning. If there was ever a time for us to go off somewhere and make love, that night was it. But we didn’t. By nightfall the city had gone up in flames. North Side, West Side, and South, the dense, rotting neighborhoods burned. The ghettoes—that dumbass word that so rankled and yet was indisputably appropriate—they burned. As if the bloody Negro past itself were being incinerated.
Eventually the fires were quelled and city life started again. So did school. In lit class we picked up Emma Bovary right where we left her; I went back to my standard lunches of grilled cheese sandwiches and sweet rolls in the cafeteria; and the much adored history professor, Daniel Bluestein, lectured us on Emma Goldman and gave high marks to the paper I wrote on the Soviet underground press.
“Cass. There you are. Come here and hug me. Don’t you look . . . ah . . . devil may care.”
It was only then, when Aunt Ivy used that phrase, that I remembered: I should have changed before coming to the party.
I was in a washed-out floral Indian print top, my trusty bell bottoms, and big, road-soiled work boots. Ivy wore a navy blue frock at exactly the fashionable length, just above her dimpled knees. At age—what?—fifty-six? fifty-eight?—she was a size eight with a minuscule waist, gorgeous skin, slender arms and hands, and beautifully tapered legs without a single visible mark, let alone a varicose vein.
She brushed a few wild strands of hair back from my face and planted a loving kiss on my brow. Then she interlaced her fingers with mine and just stood there looking at me while I blushed helplessly.
Ivy’s eyes were gray—kind, but strangely opaque. When I was little I thought she could see in the dark like the patchy old tom cat to whom my grandmother would occasionally toss a scrap of food.
Ivy and Woody were not the typical mom and dad. I didn’t have many friends whose parents could be a source of comparison, but it didn’t take me long to realize just how different Ivy and Woody were. Not knowing thing one about raising a kid, let alone a melancholy preadolescent, they were constantly improvising. They spoiled me rotten in some ways. It was glorious. Getting over on them became so easy I got bored with it.
Ivy, with her infallible manners, unfailing tact, and matching good taste, made a lady of me, more or less. At least I’d know how to behave like one if the situation ever arose.
She took my arm and walked with me into the main room. Ordinarily dozens of decked-out relations, young and old from near and far, would be half in the bag and seriously partying at this stage of the annual get-together. Tonight, I could count the attendees using my fingers and toes.
The hall was like the waiting room at a cancer clinic. No one dancing to the live music that Woody had arranged at no small cost to himself. Nor were there any welcoming smiles on the few faces I did see.
“Not very festive, is it?” Ivy said. Tears gathered at the bottom rims of her eyes.
“Why go through with it?” I asked, trying not to sound too testy. “I mean—” I stopped there and gestured at the huge, underpopulated room.
“I know. But we decided it was too late to call it off. Besides, it might be the best thing, Woody said, to have the whole family together at a time like this. People need to know they still have family, something to count on even when the worst thing in the world happens. We may be laid low but we are not afraid. We’re going to move forward, no matter what.”
A stirring speech. But if those words had come out of my uncle’s mouth, I was Lois Lane. No, those were her sentiments. Bet on it. She had convinced Woody to go ahead with the plan, and convinced herself of that rah-rah-we-shall-overcome bullshit.
“Have something to eat, Cass,” she said. “Unless you’re on a diet.”
“I’m not on a diet, Ivy.”
I checked out her weird eyes again. She wasn’t crying and she didn’t look afraid. She looked grief stricken and maybe a little crazy. Before I could speak again, she turned on her heel and walked off.<
Continues...
Excerpted from Jackson Park by Charlotte Carter Copyright © 2003 by Charlotte Carter. Excerpted by permission.
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