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“Thank you,” Dame said, sliding his hand between my legs. He handed me a rock and I pitched it this time ... way out into the middle of the water where the ripples would take some time to reach us.
Chapter Nineteen
I met Dame out there the next morning. Just like we’d planned, a bit before dawn, I drove along the throat to where the bottom of the trees were as black as tar and the dirt was so soft it felt like peat moss. I did this ... not once ... but every “ just before dawn” that week before graduation. And every time I got there, Dame’s Bentley would already be at the foot of the trees, sleepy and quiet, seeming to wait for me to knock on the window to wake it up. He had Mr. Green drive him to Tuscaloosa from Atlanta each night after he left a show or the studio. He’d sleep the whole way during the drive and wake just in time for me. Then Dame would get out or I’d get in and we’d talk a bit and giggle and sometimes hold hands and walk out into the water to watch the sun rise. I’d let go of telling myself this was all nothing on the first day with the yellowhammer. And by the second, I knew it was something I wanted so badly that I’d wake up long before the moon went to bed and the roosters came out to post. It was a rush that kept me feeling more alive than I could recall, just tingling up the middle of my back and happy just because. It was like I was a fish and Dame was the lake. I had to get to it. To hear his stories, his radical and sometimes visionary ideas. To have him listen to mine ... really listen to mine and encourage me and remind me of what it felt like to really believe I was brilliant.
By day four, when I packed my gym bag and reminded a heavy-eyed Evan I was exercising before I went to work, I remembered what Kayla and Billie said about crazy love that night at Wilhagens. About the crazy, headless chicken, Bobby and Whitney, Luther and those love songs he sang. How love was supposed to make you feel something. Passion. Sick. Crazy. Walking out of the house to meet Dame, I thought maybe this was me now. I felt sick, out of breath, and suffocating whenever I wasn’t with him. And when I knew it was almost time for us to meet again, when I was just about to fall into a deeper sleep in my bed, passion would find me and like a headless chicken, I’d jump up out of bed and race to get to the river. None of this sounded comforting, but it felt so good. Like hot cookies right out of the oven, cooled by my lips, and then in my mouth. It was warm and cozy and something else I couldn’t describe, but anyone else who’d had that cookie before just knew. When I pulled up next to the Bentley, I remembered Billie and Kayla high-fiving over the table, oozing and agreeing about this feeling. Now, in my mind, I was high-fiving and oozing and agreeing with them. I knew this crazy feeling, the secret of the hot cookie. What Zenobia knew. What Ms. Lindsey knew. But back then, I had no real launching pad. And, I knew it was dangerous to compare Evan to Dame in this way. If I were a fish, Evan was another fish swimming in the lake beside me. That’s how we’d learned to love each other. For me, it wasn’t about longing or passion. It was about loving that he’d always swim beside me and was a fish just like me. This had been enough—I’ d been taught this was enough—for me forever. But by day five, when the week had ended and I’d been late for work every day but still arrived with a smile stapled to my face, I wondered if forever was enough.
“You gonna tell us yet why you been smiling so much now, Mrs. DeLong?” Devin Kin
g said just before the fourth-period bell rang and I was still greeting the students as they walked into the room.
“Excuse me?” I asked, trying now not to smile so brightly, but knowing it probably had the reverse effect—the smile was even bigger.
“There it is—big, old Kool-Aid smile!” Opal said, pointing at me, and the other students started laughing.
“Well, can’t your teacher just be happy?” I asked.
“I ain’t never seen no grown person looking that happy,” Devin said. “Not unless they drunk or high.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, realizing that maybe I felt both drunk and high inside. Dame surprised me that morning with a recording of himself performing the song he’d written for me. Only this time, it was without a background. No music. No singing. He said when he got into the studio to record it, he felt like the music and the background singers were only hiding his words. That he wanted his feelings to be loud and clear, nude and unmistakable. He opened all of the windows and doors and turned the sound all the way up and played the song out loud to the whole forest. His love for me, how he saw me, echoed all around me. The birds knew. The squirrels knew. The trees knew. The lake knew. And now I knew, too. Not my big white house. Not my pretty red car, or even any gift my father or Evan had ever given me could amount to this. It was the biggest, most honest gesture I’d known. And unlike the house and car and jewels, no one could ever see these words. And then Dame promised that no one would ever hear them either. He wasn’t going to use the song on the next album. Not as long as I was with Evan.
“Your husband must’ve gotten you something nice,” Zenobia said. She smiled and eased back into her seat. “Some diamonds or platinum.” In just two weeks, she had swollen to the size of a woman who was about to deliver. It seemed like she was carrying all of her love, all of her needs, right there in front of her. Only I knew that wouldn’t come out with the baby in six months. Fat or skinny, it would always be there until Zenobia learned to fulfill those needs herself.
“Maybe he got her a new car!” Opal added and another student ran to the window to look out at the lot.
“Sit down, silly,” I said, laughing. “There’s no new car.”
“Then what is it?” someone asked.
“I am just happy.” I walked over toward the organ to sit down to begin our warm-up. “Just happy.”
After we finished warming up and we’d sung through the Negro anthem, to my satisfaction I was met with groans and rolling eyes when I played the first chords of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The music sheets were long gone and now we were supposed to be confident, singing with our bodies erect, faces up, and mouths wide, but I had none of this in front of me. They were slouching and looking down and not at all prepared to sing.
“Come on, folks,” I said, getting up from the organ. “We only have a week until graduation. We can’t afford to look like this.”
“We tired,” Opal acknowledged.
“Tired of what?” I asked. “You all are too young to be tired.”
“Not tired like that,” she answered.
“We tired of singing this old people song,” Devin said, and they all chuckled just light enough not to offend me.
“It’s not an old people; it’s your song,” I said. “Our song.”
“We know all that. We know everything you told us about the slaves and how it’s supposed to be about hope, but really, to us, it don’t sound like hope,” Kim Davis, one of the lead sopranos, said. “People sing this song at funerals.”
“That’s because it feels like death. Like we dying or something ... and we don’t want massa to hit us over the head with no shackle when we running off to freedom,” Devin added and his voice mimicked that of a stereotypical slave. The chuckle in the room went to a full laugh this time.
“Look, I understand,” I started, and the little yet grown-looking, faces around me went to looking like they’d never heard me say I understood them before. “It does sound old. And sometimes it does sound sad ... but ...” I tried, but I couldn’t think of any encouragement I hadn’t already said. Yes, there was hope. Yes, there was history. Yes, there was tradition. But sometimes, even those things needed a face-lift. If the children weren’t feeling anything ... they weren’t feeling anything. Maybe they needed something else.
I paused and gazed out the windows. I saw the trees out by the edge of the parking lot, looking tall and smart. They knew what to say. They knew all of the secrets. Caught every echo we’d ever uttered.
“Let’s try something different,” I said, turning back to the class. “You say it sounds old. You say it feels like death. Let’s take the sound away.” I walked past the organ and right to the middle of the floor. “Let’s take the sound away. And give it our own sound and our feeling.”
“You mean, sing it a cappella?” Kim asked.
“Yes.”
