Till You Hear From Me: A Novel (19 page)

Black Activist Clergy United for Progress. How could he forget that?

Mr. Eddie put down his glass and disappeared back into the kitchen. “I always thought that was a gutsy name for a group of preachers,” Wes said. “I’m glad you hung on to it for this latest campaign.”

“Why wouldn’t I hang on to it?” the Rev said. “It was my idea.”

“I should have known that.” Wes nodded. “It’s genius. When you hear it or read it, your mind immediately gives you the unspoken word, so you internalize it as
back the fuck up
even though you never say the word.”

“We better not!” The Rev laughed.

Wes looked over at me and smiled apologetically. “Excuse my French!”

When was the last time you heard anybody actually say that? Especially anybody under seventy-five? I just looked at him.

“That was exactly my intention,” the Rev said. “And here comes that fool from
The Constitution
asking me if it meant we were there to provide
backup
to some other Negroes who were actually leading the charge. And what Negroes would that be? I asked him. Have you seen any of them around here lately?”

“It’s the age of the Internet,” Wes said. “Everybody gets to be a reporter.”

“I should be glad they even sent somebody to talk to me,” the Rev said. “It’s like pulling teeth for me to get any coverage these days.”

“From what Pop tells me, you’re drawing standing room only crowds everywhere you go.”

“Well, if that’s who you’re trying to meet, I’ve got you covered, but folks who fly in on private jets aren’t usually looking to talk to the usher board at the First Baptist Church of Moultrie.”

I couldn’t tell if my father was signifying or just stating a fact. The hardworking people the Rev could always count on didn’t usually show up as a desirable demographic no matter who compiled the list.

“The people who own that jet don’t want to talk to them either,” Wes said. “They want to sell them something.”

And that, I thought, is the big difference between politics and business. If they’re constituents, you have to actually go out there and speak to them. In business, all you have to do is take their money. Suddenly, I had a question.

“Whose jet is it?”

Wes turned and looked at me the way people do when you ask them how much money they make, which, of course, only makes
you more curious. “Just a client of mine,” he said. “Company out of Texas. They had a plane coming to Atlanta so I caught a ride.”

“Now, that’s a state I never wanted to take a drive through,” Mr. Eddie said, coming back in and picking up where he left off. “Too big and too flat. You can go for miles in Texas with no place to turn off if you need to.”

“Too many mad white folks,” the Rev said.

“Can’t fault ’em there,” Mr. Eddie said. “If I lived in Texas, I’d be mad, too.”

Beside me, the Rev’s stomach growled so loud that I heard it. He grinned at me and patted his stomach. “That catfish smells done to me. What do you think, Brother Harper?”

Mr. Eddie stood up and put down his glass. “I think that’s good enough for me. Dinner is served.”

As we headed to the kitchen for the feast Mr. Eddie had prepared, Wes fell in next to me.

“Oil,” he said, still smiling. He was taller than I remembered, or maybe just not as heavy.

“Excuse me?”

“My client with the plane,” he said. “He’s in oil.”

When we got to the table, he pulled out my chair.

TWENTY-THREE

T
HEY ATE EVERY PIECE OF CATFISH, DEVOURED EVERY EAR OF CORN, AND
waved off Mr. Eddie’s apologies for the store-bought tomatoes that couldn’t match his own homegrown. They lingered for a few more minutes, enjoying coffee and Miss Iona’s pound cake. Over the course of the meal, Ida B and Wes had successfully established an easy familiarity that acknowledged their past interaction, but didn’t hold it against each other.

Wes felt like he knew a lot of women like Ida. Smart, attractive, sexually active, and unattached. She said she was “between jobs,” which usually meant frantically looking for one, but he assumed she was just being evasive. She answered his questions about her campaign involvement pleasantly enough, but when he confessed that he had decided to sit it out, for business reasons, she just smiled and changed the subject. It was the same look he had gotten from his friends who had seen action in Iraq or Afghanistan whenever he ventured an opinion about the war. It was the way you would look at
a five-year-old trying to talk about the stock market. No chance of understanding, so why bother to engage?

That was, of course, exactly how he wanted her to think of him. As an ambitious young businessman, prepared to sit out the election of a lifetime in order to avoid offending his clients, but not above taking advantage of the new racial space that was Obamamerica. Her question about the owner of the plane was to be expected. It had just caught him off guard because he had been so focused on the Rev. His initial feeling had been right on target. The Rev was still feeling the blowback from the whole Wright episode and his exclusion from the new president’s national orbit was as painful as it had been when he realized he had not been invited to the inauguration.

“Can you believe that?” he had asked at dinner. “I still can’t believe it. Who the hell do these Negroes think they are?”

Wes noticed that when the Rev started slamming the president, Ida B kept her eyes on her plate or on her cup; anywhere but her father’s face.

“The thing he’s got to understand,” the Rev was saying, “is that this can’t be about a cult of personality. It has to be bigger than loving Obama. We can’t keep building our movements around one man.”

Mr. Eddie shook his head. “You can say that if you wanna, Rev, but most people figure if they get the right man, he’ll bring the right idea.”

“So that means we’ve got to find somebody new for them to love every time there’s an election?” the Rev said. “What if there’s nobody lovable willing to run? Then what?”

“Then you get John McCain,” Wes said. Ida B rewarded him with a grin.

“Half the people we registered went to the polls thinking they were voting for an Obama/Dunbar ticket,” Mr. Eddie said.

“That would have been Dunbar/Obama.” The Rev laughed. “And don’t forget it!”

Ida B laughed, too. She was prettier than Wes had first thought. Maybe because she had been a little tense when they first got there. He had watched her slowly relax, laughing at his father’s jokes, shaking her head at the Rev’s life on the road stories, and eventually turning toward him, her gaze intelligent and unblinking, not at all like the shy, skinny kid who never seemed to be able to look him in the eye. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She was almost as tall as he was and slender without sacrificing her womanly curves. Wes was old-fashioned. He liked a woman with a little meat on her bones. Not jiggling and juicy, but enough to give a man something to grab on to when the spirit moved him. He wondered what she liked to grab on to when the spirit moved her.

The Rev yawned and turned to Ida B. “Well, daughter, it’s getting late. Time for us to take our leave.”

“Can I help with the cleanup?” she said.

“Not a chance.” Mr. Eddie shook his head. “You need to get this old man home so he’ll have energy enough to drive himself to Macon tomorrow.”

“You’re driving yourself?” Ida B sounded surprised. “Why?”

The Rev stood up and looked at Mr. Eddie. “My right-hand man here is being honored at an assembly event over at the high school. Too late for me to reschedule, so I’m on my own.”

This was too easy, Wes thought. He almost felt guilty about what he was getting ready to do.
Almost
.

“We can’t have that,” Wes said, standing up, too. “I’d be honored to drive you.”

The Rev looked surprised. “To Macon?”

“All the way down and all the way back,” Wes said. “It’ll give me a chance to bend your ear about my new office. What do you say?”

“I might just take you up on that,” the Rev said slowly. “Can you be ready at six?”

Mr. Eddie was smiling and nodding, obviously pleased that Wes had stepped up without being asked.

“Absolutely.”

That’s when Ida B spoke up, sounding concerned. “Aren’t you going to the assembly?” she said, looking at Wes with a small frown.

Before he could answer, Mr. Eddie spoke up in his defense. “I didn’t invite him. You know I don’t like a whole lot of fuss around me.”

Wes turned to his father. “What’s going on?”

“Flora Lumumba’s daughter got me doing a garden with the kids. It worked out pretty good so they want to thank me. I told them to name it after the Rev, but Lu said they still want to give me a plaque or something.”

Wes wondered whether his father really didn’t want him to come or if he was just giving him a way out if Wes didn’t want to be bothered.
And he truly didn’t want to be bothered
. Sitting in a high school auditorium listening to a bunch of kids talking about how growing a patch of collard greens changed their lives was his idea of a morning in hell.

“Well, since Pop didn’t invite me, I’m going to take him at his word that he’s got no particular need to see my face in the place.” He turned to his father, who nodded, looking relieved.

“But I also think,” Wes turned to Ida B, “that he might not mind having somebody around just to … handle the media.”

She smiled. “I think I can arrange that. How about it, Mr. Eddie? Can I be your press secretary for tomorrow?”

Mr. Eddie’s grin alone was worth the price of admission. “Now you’re talkin’.”

TWENTY-FOUR

W
ES HARPER WAS THE KIND OF MAN WHOSE CHARM FOOLS YOU INTO
trusting him when your brain is telling you to run for your life. He was fine, too. There was no denying that. Not
pretty boy fine
, but grown man fine. My type, if someone as deprived as I’ve been lately can even be said to have a “type.” And he had a great smile. I say all that so that the degree of discipline necessary to make what I’m about to say
truth
instead of wishful thinking will be clear.
I did not conduct any testing once I got home to see whether or not Wes was still able to perform the function he had executed so reliably during the three or four years that he was in my fantasy guy stable
. It seemed a little inappropriate to go from having dinner at his father’s house to asking his fantasy doppelganger to lick this, or squeeze that, or slow down,
or whatever
. What would Mr. Eddie say if he knew?