[1974]
...Heller plates. Bright yellow with upright sides, the set a graduation gift from Dad’s Aunt Jo. Very hip, Aunt Jo, with her cymbal earrings and silver dreads, teaching literacy to ex-cons in Imamu Baraka’s New-Ark and gone far too early from her “pressure”, which should have been a warning. Heller plates smeared with the remains of a vegetarian casserole because Francie was off meat. That bottle of Mateus rose pulled from the back of the uppermost shelf because they’d already done the Blue Nun. The Mateus bought way before the African Liberation Committee started talking about boycotting Portuguese wine in support of our revolutionary comrades in FRELIMO in their battles against the colonizers of Angola, probably one of the housewarming bottles from when Alex had moved in what? Eighteen months ago? After realizing that she’d been wasting her time in grad school, couldn’t concentrate worth a damn, so better contributing to the Struggle than wasting Daddy’s money, even if it was only teaching art to little kids because wasn’t giving flight to young minds one of the foremost goals of the Movement -- pride in that flight, power in that flight, in the big-brush paintings of their worlds, their street corners, their mamas and daddies, their brothers and sisters, their dreams?
No matter what her Mama said about Alex wasting time in the far reaches of Bed-Stuy where there’d be no marriage prospect worth a damn, and anyway, marriage the last thing on Alex’s mind. Not to one of the bougie princes her mama kept trying to push her way; and why she thought that bougie provenance important after picking Daddy for her own self? Defied her own mama but directing her daughters down the road she didn’t take. Beside herself with pride now that Corrie had gotten her manicured nails into Reggie. Like that Scotch-drinking, nipple-pinching, horny dog of a manchild from Chicago was some kind of prize because his daddy made millions selling burial insurance to poor black folks who would have been better off buying books for their kids and grandbabies instead of committing their weekly dimes and dollars for as regal a rollout to the Promised Land as Galilee Insurance would allow them after the considerable “administration” costs . No Reginald Negro for Alexandra Louise! No fucking way.
The vegetarian casserole just about edible this time because she’d paid closer attention to the proportions when part of her didn’t see what percentage of nuts to root vegetables and cheese could make that dish into something you would look forward to considering a meal. Bettina had added a salad and Tabasco. Bettina always added Tabasco, kept some in her bag. Had to say that it helped with the casserole, Louisiana fire giving taste buds something better to remember than straw and good intentions.
“That Portuguese oppressor all you got?” sniffed Bettina.
“Look, my dedicated Sister B,” Francie’d said placing the ovoid bottle secure between her dancer’s thighs before yanking out the cork, “if you really want to weigh the political implications of buying grape manufactured by a current colonial power against that of a country stripped of its African colonies in punishment for one world war, when that didn’t stop said country from starting another; and who could say that all the Jew and Negro-hating elements of the German psyche have been sufficiently suppressed in less than thirty years to trust that that treacling Nun, the color of fool’s gold, isn’t a campaign to poison the issue of Allied invaders and thus no less counter-revolutionary than the bright pink of Portugal’s rosé which is certainly less gut and brain-destroying than the fortified thunderbirds and ripples of the California Gallo Brothers. And what would you expect from a state governed by a washed-up, borax-selling, right-wing actor with Presidential pretensions who murdered George Jackson and tried his best to shove Angela under the ground as well – then I’d say that too much of the Man’s edjumacation is addling your brain.”
“Fuck you, Francie,” Bettina had smiled while rolling the first joint from the stash she’d purchased just down the block from a classroom at Penn Law.
Lighting, toking, passing it on. Miles pulsating from the corner box. On the Corner pulsing past the lava lamp Carlo had given her as half a joke. “Psychedelic, baby sis! Gotta get down with the get down!” Carlo getting down with a determination he lent to nothing else. Very seldom getting up if the truth be told.
Alex, not usually so partial to weed, let alone the potent sinsemilla Bettina has managed to score, but thankful for its magic carpet this night because she’s just spent the last day with her kids, her sweet, smudge-toothed, snot-nosed kids, eyes glittering with hope but already veiled by pain some of them, because the center had lost its funding. At least that’s what Malik was saying. The floor of her apartment now scattered with paintings and drawings and cards signed to Sister Alex like she was another kind of nun. Brown-faced mommies with colorful head wraps, stickball games with stick figure players. The one picnic they’d managed to organize in Prospect Park: big fat trees with warbling birds, a baseball mitt. A dead junkie. Miles pulsing out. The bass player…
“Michael Henderson! Michael fucking Henderson!” Francie reading the album cover and Alex’s mind, as she has for years, as both these women have for years. “You play, my brother! You take.. that.. shit .. out!” then in a quick shift of mode to Alex, “But can you tell me, please, where the fuck is Miles? Man goes bleep and just steps back. I agree he fine and all Prince of Darkness in those tight leather pants, but beep, beep? I want some more of that silk satin sound. You our resident artiste, Lexxie, ‘splain this to me.”
Alex took hold of the album cover, the yellow in its cartoon cover the same as that in her Heller plates. “You gotta think of Miles like Picasso, Francie. Man don’t want to sit still, be predictable or categorized. You can follow him or not follow him. He doesn’t give a damn. He’s pressing forward, creating, and it’s just so… Black. It’s the street outside. It’s the pain and beauty in the artwork scattered around this floor. It’s Angela’s fist...”
Francie grabbing Alex around the neck in a hug. “You so serious, girl! You know I’ll be wanting to dance on this tomorrow.” Francie planting a big kiss on Alex’s cheek. Miles pulsing. Screek, screek.
“You believe him?” Bettina on an inhale, her words sucked in on a hard sibilant like the smoke but easy to understand because the question had been on all of their minds. She’s not speaking of Miles Davis.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
What Alex felt more than anything else was tired, tired from keeping the kids buoyed up in the face of so much uncertainty about the center, tired from keeping herself going in the face of having no idea what she was actually doing with her life, tired of all the hair on her head. Maybe she should dread it, or chop it all off. “I gave up trying to follow that man’s games months ago. I want to though.”
“Want to what?” Another hit for Bettina before Francie unwrapped her fingers from the joint.
“Believe him.” If she was any good at cornrowing, she’d cornrow her hair, but she wasn’t and, tender-headed as she was, the thought of some sister yanking on her scalp for hours was no possibility.
“Man’s a slime,” sucked Francie, who had had a short something with Malik the summer after graduation. “It was a thing,” she’d said at the time. “No other way to classify it. A thing with a thing.”
“Which thing you talkin’ about?” Bettina had leered. Malik’s equipment was the stuff of legend.
“Baby, if it had just been about his thing thing, I may have hung in there a bit longer. If only his disposition had been as half as impressive as his dick…”
“Lord, save us from dicks without doctrine!”
“Well, I don’t know. Isn’t that part of a sister’s civilizing imperative, to drum some couth into dicks without doctrine?”
“And how successful has your mission been, Sister Francie?”
“In the case of Malik Abdul Hassan, formerly Cecil Robertson the Third abject fucking failure, Sister Betty, but for a few blinks of that eye, Lord have mercy!”
“I refuse to believe that he’d stoop so low as to sell the souls of those babies.”
The carpet has lifted, Miles’ horn bubbling under. Were those stars visible in the gap between rooftop pigeon coops across the street and light-traced cloud cover? One thing to be said for Harrison: there’d been plenty of stars to be seen on a new moon night, when Alex was younger, uncitied, and the Milky Way the getaway carpet of her dreams. Stars in her hair.
“I mean, he loved those kids, he really did. All one of those little boys had to do was hug one of his legs and his eyes would go all soft and light and you could see his mama’s home-trained Cecil behind the Malik.”
“Please tell me that you didn’t succumb to that man’s trifling game, Alexandra! I know I learned you better than that!”
“I didn’t succumb. I’m just saying he loved those kids because he did. Now maybe the borough council paid him off; maybe the developer paid him off. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. It’s done now. The wrecking crew was there this afternoon scouting, putting marks on the walls as we were packing up. Everyone crying, teachers, parents, the kids getting spooked by us crying, and those crackers eying us like we some form of insect. Not even nasty. Inconsequential.”
Francie ignored Alex’s attempt to refuse the joint, stuck it between her lips. “You need this, girl. So what now? School again?” Unable to choose between her love of dance and her passion for biology, Francie was currently devising a doctorate that incorporated the two. School was her natural habitat.
“I’ve got the feeling that school and I have had our time.” A shake of her head and stars sparkling through the lamp lava.
“Cooper Edwards been in touch with you yet?” Bettina hadn’t even tried to look innocent.
“You’ve seen Cooper Edwards?” The carpet gone and Alex’ss heart flopped to her pelvic floor.
“Our own personal White Negro, wasn’t he headed to the Sorbonne or some shit?” Francie’d never been overly impressed with the very rich and WASP Cooper who’d spent much of their school time skirting the boundaries of the black social scene, dating black girls from town because the School’s sisters never gave him the time of day.
“Word is he flunked out.” Bettina’s eyes steady on Alex trying to collect herself.
“How the hell he flunk out of the Sorbonne? It takes a heap of trying to flunk out the Sorbonne and the onliest thing Cooper Edwards ever tried hard at was crawling up David Prescott’s backside.” Francie’s hand flew to her mouth as Bettina grabbed the weed away.
“You’ve had enough of this. Can’t take you nowhere, girl.” Francie casts an eye toward Alex, mouthing the word “sorry” with such exaggeration that Alex’s heart resumes its beat.
“He’s looking to get into Penn on a legacy.” Bettina’s eyes full on Alex now, as were Francie’s. “He ran into me when he came up for the interview – like he even had to bother with all that money his daddy donates. Took me out for a coffee, but only because he’s wanting to talk to you, Alex.”
All eyes clear now, the sensimilla haze penetrated by what Cooper might have to say about David. What news he might have of David; for David Prescott, whom no one has seen since he was arrested with a cache of guns he was intending to bring on campus; David, who was heading to underneath some jail but somehow managed to skip the country two years before, has been the near-unrequited love of Alexandra Walker’s life, over whom she’s half-tried to get over but never succeeded.
David Prescott is the reason Alex Walker couldn’t concentrate on her Masters. Though he, despite sleeping with her on and off for three or four months, never really acknowledged her existence let alone her love, David Prescott has dominated Alex Walker’s heart since she first caught sight of him in a common room window seat way back in freshman year, against practicality, against self-respect, against the sweet brother who tutored the center’s kids in science who might actually have loved her; against her girls making clear over and over again that a Black Heathcliff was as bad a trap for a sister’s heart as the Bronte original was for poor Cathy. Cooper Edwards is the son of David’s Pittsburgh patron, a man with power and finesse more than adequate to slip even a felonious Negro protégé through any government net. Cooper would know where David is, what David is doing...
