No Crystal Stair (34 page)

Cora nodded, trying not to smile.

A tiny woman in the front stood up. “Mr. Wimbush, I think this is a wonderful organization and I have an excellent proposal to make.” When the chairman, who seemed to have lost his voice, only stared at her, she continued, “Why don't we take Negroes and Jews in as members? Then we'd
really
be able to keep an eye on them. Of course, we might have to change the bylaws a bit, but—”

By this time Mr. Wimbush had caught on and was glaring at his now-laughing audience in disgust. “This is a farce!” He gathered up his papers and stormed out of the room, followed by only one man.

Alice Ross was almost hysterical. “Did you see his face!” she cried as they all gathered around to congratulate one another. “I can't wait for Ann Elizabeth to hear this tape,” she told Julia Belle. “She'll be proud of us.”

 

 

January 1968

 

It was raining hard, a cold winter rain, that Wednesday morning when the phone rang. Early, before the alarm went off. Ann Elizabeth picked it up with trepidation.

It was Bertha. “Ann Elizabeth, they got my Sammy.”

“No! Oh, no!” Her mind flew back twenty-two years to a cuddly dark-skinned toddler. “I'm so sorry ... I...” she fumbled for some comforting word.

Bertha wasn't listening. Her rage bounced, sputtered and spun through the wire. “It ain't right! It ain't right! My baby lying in some slimy swamp in that godforsaken shit-ass country where he didn't have no business to be! On account of these crazy white folks' god-awful war, which he didn't even know nothin' 'bout. They didn't ask him, neither! Just here's your number, put on this suit, take this gun and go out there and shoot some po' ass fool that don't know why he's there, neither. Ann Elizabeth,
you know Sammy.” Her voice broke. “He couldn't hurt a flea. You know that.”

She did know. The other boy, Hodge, a year younger, was still at college on his football scholarship. But Sammy—“He bright, ain't tough like Hodge,” Bertha had said, “and not all that bright, neither, but he's a good boy, got a good job at the nursery”—Sammy had gotten swallowed up by the draft and Vietnam. It was 1968 now and the war was still going on!

But this wasn't the time to be bitter. “I'll be right there,” Ann Elizabeth said.

She drove through the rain and the morning traffic, her heart aching for Bertha. She was a mother, too, and she couldn't help being glad that Bobby was safe in medical school, safe from that dreadful war. Would it never end?

 

 

Later that year she wondered if it really was true that bad things happened in threes.

Sammy's death was personal, of course, and a terrible blow, but he was just one of a great many. Martin Luther King's assassination, however, was a blow to the whole world—“though they might not know what they've lost,” her father said.

Bertha said the same thing in a different way. “Killed him ‘cause he was trying to tell'em what they don't wanna believe—ain't no difference between black and white. There's po' white folks, too, and don't nobody, black or white, want their kid killed in a crazy war we ain't got no business in, anyway!”

Ann Elizabeth just felt very sad, especially when the assassination triggered riots across the nation. “I can understand the anger,” she said to Rob. “Their grief must be as great as mine. But the violence and destruction are insults to his memory. This man accomplished so much for all of us—and did it while keeping to the Christian principles of nonviolence.”

A few months later Senator Robert Kennedy, campaigning for president, was assassinated in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel.

“What's happening?” Ann Elizabeth asked as she and Rob watched a repeat of the dreadful episode in the peace of their living room. “Here in the United States where we've always had open and peaceful elections.”

“Which, in spite of everything, is still the best place in the entire world to be,” said Rob, who had just returned from a trip to the Middle East.

In the spring of 1969, Ann Elizabeth helped Maggie fill out her college applications.

February 1971

 

T
hey were still at it. Rob hadn't stopped nagging his daughter since she'd turned up with that short Afro haircut Friday afternoon.

Ann Elizabeth sighed. “I'd better put the food away,” she said, and fled to the kitchen.

No escape. Rob's voice boomed from the living room. “I don't get it! Why you do your damnedest to look like something the cat dragged in is beyond me. Beat-up jeans and those scrubby tennis shoes are bad enough. But when you practically scalp yourself to—”

“Oh, Dad, you just want my hair long and straight like white girls!”

“And you want it short and nappy like the gals in that gang you run with!”

“I want it like it is!” Maggie said. “Natural. Just wash and wear! It's easy this way.”

Certainly easier than all the straightening and setting, Ann Elizabeth thought, smiling as she spooned rice into a Tupperware container. Still, Rob was right. Maggie was just trying to conform to the new Neg—
black
image. Lord, would she never remember to say black, not Negro or colored?

“Anyway, what's wrong with my gang”?

She heard the defiance in Maggie's voice and her smile faded. Be careful what you wish for, woman. You might get it! How she'd longed for Maggie to have a gang. How she'd ache for
the daughter who kept her nose buried in a book, with never a group of friends to talk and laugh and have fun with.

Maggie had found her group at Berkeley. Black classmates, like herself, and she was clinging to them like mad. But they weren't the happy laughing group Ann Elizabeth had hoped she'd have. These young people were angry, rebellious, demanding. Worse, Maggie had begun to emulate them.

Poor kids, Ann Elizabeth had mused. They don't know how far we've come, and they're not good at listening. Rob seemed to enjoy the debates, but Ann Elizabeth shuddered every time Maggie brought Ted, Sue or any of her new friends home. Not that it was any better when Maggie came alone, she thought now as the argument continued.

“I'll tell you what's wrong with you and your gang,” Rob said. “You think you're supposed to run things—the school, the state and the whole damn country!”

“We're
involved
!” Maggie countered.

“Right! And you don't know shit from shinola!”

Ann Elizabeth shut the kitchen door. She'd heard it all before. She filled a box with fried chicken, rolls and most of the cookies she'd baked the previous day for Maggie to take back with her. College kids were always hungry. When she had the counters clean and the dishwasher going, she returned to the living room. The heated discussion had switched to the subject of black history.

“Do you realize that blacks have been eliminated from history altogether? From books? From history courses?” Maggie said.

Not quite, Ann Elizabeth thought, remembering the required course in Negro history at Washington High. She'd learned that it was a Negro who'd died first in the revolution, a Negro doctor who'd performed the first heart surgery, a Negro who'd designed the Capitol in Washington D.C. but her mind had been more on dances and boys, and she hadn't been very interested.

Unlike her daughter. “We're demanding thatwe be included,” Maggie said.

“Right,” Rob agreed. “But you should want to be included in the whole thing. We're just beginning to crawl out of the separatist shit and you want to shove us back into it! Black students' union, black dormitory, black whatever. And now you want a whole black-history department!”

“Because we've been neglected for too long,”Maggie declared, and launched into a diatribe about the lack of pride felt by blacks, the lack of knowledge about their African heritage.

Rob clapped his hands. “Excellent!” he said when she was done. His voice dripped with sarcasm. “Great rhetoric! Courtesy of Mr. Oola Bunga, I take it!”

Maggie stiffened. “His African name is Lamumba!”

Rob snorted. “His real name is probably Willie Jones. And all he knows about Africa is what he's read in a book.”

“At least he's not ashamed of his blackness!”

“Hell, no! He's trading on it. This department of black studies you kids are getting your heads busted for, won't he be the nigger in charge?”

“Oh, Daddy, I wish you wouldn't use that horrible n-word! Yes, Professor Lamumba is the right person to head the black studies department we're advocating. But there's no use discussing his qualifications you with.” Maggie threw up her hands. “You don't understand.”

“You're damn right I don't understand. And what's it to you? I thought your major was political science, not niggerology!”

“There's that word again. You can't stand to say black, can you? And you're probably ashamed of your African roots!”

“My roots are here, not in African. And you know something? I
like
it here.”

“Of course you do. You get pretty good pay, sending those planes and guns to Vietnam, don't you?”

Ann Elizabeth gasped when she saw Rob wince. Working on weapons of war had not been his career choice, and she knew Maggie's jab had hurt. She braced herself for his outburst.

But Rob only smiled. “Don't knock it, girlie. That pay keeps you in those cashmere sweaters you don't wear and at that college you're so bent on tearing apart.”

Ann Elizabeth swallowed the lump in her throat, even as she felt a rush of pride. It was so like Rob to whistle away his hurt, to laugh it off. Just as he had through so many episodes of discrimination.

Maggie, unlike Rob, bristled.

“We are
not
bent on tearing it apart. We're trying to ensure that we have a part in the administration and decision-making, and that there's an emphasis on black, as well as white, culture!”

“Right on! I see Professor Mumbo Jumbo has it all figured out. He's got you all fired-up to take over!”

“Oh, I'm wasting my time talking to you.” Maggie grimaced in disgust and left the room.

Rob chuckled as he sank back in his chair and returned to his newspaper. “I'm the one wasting time. I should know better than to try to reason with a know-it-all college sophomore.”

Ann Elizabeth envied him. She wished she could take things as lightly as he did.

But she didn't like Maggie being mixed up in all the anti-this and anti-that activities. She could get hurt.

Nonsense, she told herself. Maggie wasn't at San Francisco State where the confrontations were vicious and several students had been badly hurt. But if the rallies at Berkeley continued and they brought in the city police...

She felt a real stab of fear and started toward her daughter's room, her mind resolutely searching for some happy conversational topic.

Plays? Like Mother, like daughter, she'd thought when Maggie joined a theater group. But an all-black group?

“We want to participate, Mom! Like act. In some of the major roles! Anyway,” Maggie had added, “wasn't your group all black?”

Ann Elizabeth had found herself involved in a hot debate over why a black theater group at a black university was part of the whole, and the same thing at an integrated university was separatism. There was another altercation later, when she criticized their first performance and the repertoire of future plays.

“We're telling it like it is!” Maggie had insisted. “We're not hiding behind Shakespeare!”

“No, but you're hiding
from
Shakespeare. And that's a shame.” Ann Elizabeth had said, for once losing her own temper. “Exposure to the classics is one of the major offerings of a university. Furthermore, if you limit yourself to black culture, why portray only the seamiest side and in that foul language that turns my stomach?”

No, she decided as she went into Maggie's room, drama wasn't a good choice.

She found Maggie stuffing jeans and sweatshirts into a duffle bag. Fashion was not a safe topic, either.

“Packing already?” Ann Elizabeth sat on the bed, took out the jammed-in clothes and began to smooth and fold.

“Yeah, I need to get back.” Maggie knelt to reach under the bed.

“Who cut your hair?”

“Dena.” Maggie's voice was muffled as she fumbled under the bed, finally emerging with a pair of scruffy tennis shoes.

“I like it.” The hair was much shorter, but Rob was wrong about Maggie's looks. No hairstyle could spoil her classic beauty. Not that Maggie cared. With no hint of vanity, she strode across campus without makeup and in clothes that might have come from Goodwill. Intense, resolute and defiant in the battle for . . . for whatever it was they were after. These kids! Last year at Kent State four students had been killed and nine others
injured. Ann Elizabeth shuddered. She didn't want Maggie's pretty head bashed in.

“I hope you're not planning another one of those campus rallies,” she said, repacking the folded clothes.

“Oh, Mom!” Maggie tossed in the shoes and bent to kiss her mother's cheek. “You're just an old scaredy-cat. We can't just sit around like you and Dad. Some of us have to fight for social justice.” She threw in a comb and zipped the bag shut. “There. I gotta scram.”

Ann Elizabeth followed her into the living room and handed her the box of food she'd prepared.

Maggie kissed her again. “Thanks, Mom.”Then she bent to hug her father. “See you later, alligator.”

“In a while, crocodile,” he answered. Their usual farewell. Ann Elizabeth marveled that they could be in a shouting match one minute and a joking mood the next.

She watched from the doorway as Maggie backed her Volkswagen out of the driveway and headed toward Berkeley. Back to the agitation and the rallies.

Maybe if she'd gone to Spelman...

No. According to Mother, the students there were rioting, too. The Atlanta University regents had been locked in the boardroom for twenty-four hours. ‘Wanting us to adhere to the stupidest demands,” reported Julia Belle. ”Changing the name from Atlanta to Martin Luther King University. Lord, don't they know white folks have been trying for years to buy the Atlanta name? Well, we're hanging on to it, and we're not banning whites from the board, either. As if they weren't our most influential, not to mention richest, members! I don't know what in the Sam Hill these youngsters are thinking!”

Ann Elizabeth smiled. The use of her harshest cuss words, “Sam Hill,” meant her mother was really upset.

I'm upset, too.
“Don't college kids know how to have fun anymore?” she asked, turning to Rob.

“It's marching fever!” he said, and chuckled. “But pretty soon they'll have to march to a different drummer.”

“Oh?”

“Like doing some schoolwork or getting a job. They'll find out. Hey, it's time for the game.” He put down the paper and switched on the television.

Ann Elizabeth, shaking her head at his complacency, returned to Maggie's room and began to strip the bed. Her kids were working. Maggie might be agitating, but she was still on the dean's list. And Bobby had marched and demonstrated right through medical school and halfway through his internship with out missing a beat.

An intern at Grady—where black doctors had been banned only a few years before. And already accepted as a resident at Children's Hospital, where he'd been practically smuggled in when he was a baby!

She went to the linen closet for the clean sheets, thinking of her father, who was about to burst with pride. “We'll have a celebration when you come for the wedding,” he'd said.

The wedding would be held early in June, the one month Bobby would have free before beginning his duties at Children's. Cindy, teaching in an elementary school, would be on vacation then. “Perfect timing for a honeymoon,” Cindy had said. “And I'll have the whole summer to settle us in.'

She had to admit that Cindy planned things well. Like her mother, she thought. Cindy's mother was planning, as Sophie said, “to put on the dog” at the biggest wedding Atlanta had ever seen.

So? Atlanta's social-minded mothers, her own included, had been trying to outdo one another for years.

It wasn't that. It was...

An old nursery rhyme flitted through her mind. “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell. /The reason why I cannot tell. / But this I know, and know full well, / I do not like thee, Doctor Fell!”

She shook out a sheet and began to make the bed. She didn't know why she didn't like Cindy Campbell. The girl was attractive, charming and smart.

Bobby loves her. And she must be good for him. Keeps him laughing, teasing, still his happy-go-lucky self, despite all the long hard hours at the hospital.

And I'm ashamed of myself. Possessive of my son and jealous of any woman in his life!

 

 

The wedding was held at the Methodist Church where the Campbells were members. But it took Ann Elizabeth back to that day, more than thirty years before, when she'd walked down the aisle at the Congregational Church.

She held Rob's had, her eyes misting as their son waited at the alter for his bride. Cindy was a lovely bride in the best creation of tulle and lace money could buy.

But not as beautiful as Maggie!
Ann Elizabeth's eyes focused on her daughter, standing with the other bridesmaids. Maggie's short black curls accentuated the perfection of her features, and her deep-tan skin was striking against the pale lilac of her dress. Lilac!
The exact shade of my debut dress the night I met Rob.
It seemed only yesterday. Dear God, where had all the years gone? I'm getting old.

“Maybe I should dye my hair,” she'd said to Rob earlier when she'd slipped into her dress of deep lavender and inspected herself in the mirror.

“Don't you touch it!” he'd said. “That gray kinda highlights the brown. I like it.”