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“She was trying to get a divorce?”
“You’ve already heard—my father wasn’t the easiest man to be married to. And with everything she was complaining about at lunch, it had to be so,” I said. “And the sad thing was that I was only a little upset. I was more concerned about my mother and that she was obviously going through this on her own. I wished I could be there for her, but she wasn’t the kind of woman I could call up and say, ‘Are you trying to divorce Daddy ?’ That would break her heart. She still thought of me as a baby. I had to wait and catch her at the right time.”
“I know this. My mother, whenever you say too much she doesn’t want to hear, she just stops listening. Like she’s deaf. You call her, and she says nothing,” Kweku said, and we both laughed ... along with the man behind me.
“American mothers do the same thing. Just block you out. I think it comes with giving birth.”
“So, was your husband sad about your not getting pregnant ?” Kweku asked, folding back to the start of our conversation.
“I didn’t even tell him. Evan and I were having so much fun just being lovers again that I didn’t want to ruin it. I figured I’d keep things quiet until he asked. And there was the business of his running for office. The school. The church. We were already dealing with a lot. Mentioning the test would just make the baby thing a race. That’s his way.”
“Yes, and this Dame fellow,” Kweku said and I felt my heart flush its blood out everywhere. “It sounds like that was troubling you, too.”
“Yeah,” I started and pressed myself back into my seat. “That was another part of the story.”
I looked out of the window and saw that the sky was so bright that it seemed it didn’t expect that sunset would ever come.
I gasped and tapped at the glass, covering one of the clouds with my fingertips.
Was I ready to tell this part of the story ? I wondered in my long pause. Was I ready to remember those good times ?
PART TWO
Taste
Chapter Nine
April 29, 2008
Tuscaloosa, AL
Everybody was moving. From here. To there. Over and around. The school was like an ant farm turned upside down. And not just the teachers either. The kids. Girls and boys I hadn’t seen in months were posted up in the hallways giggling and holding books in their arms I knew they hadn’t seen since the first day of school. I had full attendance in all of my morning classes and even a few students who didn’t have my class were trying to get in. And I couldn’t say no. The cafeteria was overflowing. From the cafeteria workers to the oldest teachers who knew nothing about Dame or his music, it was apparent that this was the biggest thing that had ever happened at Black Warrior. The most attention we’d gotten from the world in ... forever. Television crews? A star? In our school? Our school? The little old school for black kids that was started in a farmhouse on a plantation that once had slaves? Everyone was beside themselves. But I’d yet to feel the excitement.
I was still uneasy about my role in this whole thing, but a new piano, instruments for the band, and a proper sound system made it easier to accept the check from Dame. “You heard your father at dinner,” Evan said, bringing up the topic again one night as we sat out on the lake talking. “That boy has a bad reputation and that could hurt me later on. Those white boys downtown would love to tie me to some rapper when I run for mayor. That’s all they need. But if you do it, we can say he was one of your students and that’ll be it. Besides, he asked for you.”
When fourth period came, and we were all just a few seconds shy of Dame’s arrival, I stood in the lobby of the school with my fourth-period students collected in a huddle of excitement behind me. Along with a few other classes, mine was selected to greet Dame at the door for his tour with the camera crews from BET, while the other students waited in the auditorium.
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“When he coming?” Opal asked after I’d just managed to calm down my class again. Like a few other girls, she was wearing a T-shirt that read “The Same Dame” across the front and had a picture of Dame with no shirt on, oiled completely and flexing in the middle.
“My cousin say his tour bus just left the Waffle House on McFarland,” Devin King, the jokester of the class, said, tucking his cell phone into his pocket.
“What, that fool want his hash browns scattered, covered and smothered or something?” someone said, and everyone laughed.
“Yeah,” Opal jumped in, fanning herself. “Get his order. I want to know what he’s eating, so I can make it in the morning.”
“Girl, you ain’t got to worry about nobody being with you in the morning with those buck teeth you got,” Devin said, and the laughter grew louder.
“Okay. Okay. You all calm down or we’re going back to the classroom,” I threatened, beginning to feel their anxiousness.
The BET camera crew was busy setting up. Men dressed in T-shirts and shorts with equipment hanging from their hips pointed to this and that and recalculated measurements for some other thing. Bright flood lights were perched here and there in the lobby like we were on a real television set. And while I’d opted to do my own makeup, they even had Evan in a folding chair in the bathroom with a stylist. He decided to wear his favorite tan suit with a blue shirt and golden tie. He looked like a regular good ol’ frat boy. Just one of the guys.
“Move fast!” I heard one of the crew people say to a man carrying a camera as they ran by. “I want to get a shot of him walking in. Shoot him and then these people standing all around.”
“You guys ready?” another crew member asked, standing on a ladder and trying to organize the growing crowd. “Dame’s about to come in here and we’ll all get a glimpse of him. Let’s just remember to be patient.”
Having stepped away from my students to stand in a row of teachers who lined the head of the crowd blocking the doorway, I looked up to see Billie’s eyes frozen, transfixed on the door. “He’s coming,” she said breathlessly as she might have at a Bobby Brown concert when we were thirteen. Her brown eyes were opened wide and the flashes from cameras flickered there for a second.
