They were hanging out by the hall bookshelf, glancing into the living room where denture-rattling Uncle Ralston sat with a mute Ralston Jr. and a low-moaning Aunt Gloria. Everyone was in the kitchen or the dining room, Mom and Dad, too, so as not to have to navigate that triangle of family weirdness.
I looked at Cello’s father, sitting in his fantastic absence of mind. His first breakdown wasn’t called that, but the second, in 1964, was impossible to explain away. He became manic over Dizzy Gillespie’s campaign for the presidency. They brought him home, almost hog-tied. Cello was twelve. Before she ever had a date, he’d been brought back from Africa, and then he starved himself in an adaptation of Dick Gregory’s diet. In those days, he carried around chess pawns that he’d press into our palms. We’d hand his secrets over to Dad.
“Who they?” a former crazy asked of me in the hall outside the living room.
“When the going gets rough, make pancakes,” I heard Dad chime somewhere.
* * *
“Happy trails. Put it there.”
“Jed.”
He slow-motion punched my Pillsbury Doughboy middle. “Jed.”
He didn’t tell me his name, but I knew his name because he came to see Mom a lot in the days following the riot.
The white boy backed Dad up in his not letting Mom go to any more demonstrations that summer. Dad said it was bad enough that there were psycho nurse killers loose in the city. As if to make it up to her, the white boy let Mom convert his feelings into an eyewitness account of a white riot by one of the rioters who had repented of his ways and joined the very movement he had attacked. He spoke roughly; she put it down cleaned up. He understood quickly that that was how things were done.
I sat around and watched them, my legs swinging from the chair. He lasted two weeks in the movement. He confessed that his people didn’t know about his open letter in the Eagle, a colored newspaper, and they didn’t want him in parts of town he didn’t know after dark, even at his age. He’d not told his people enough about what he pretended was the church group he’d become interested in. I’d somehow won my own copy of that issue of the Eagle, though I did not understand what the trouble was about. I couldn’t believe he’d been one of the whites throwing cherry bombs at our cars. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
I’d come across the yellowed copy of his letter from the summer of 1966 in the bottom of the last box in my closet. I started to ask Mom what had become of him, but I didn’t want to learn that she’d found his name on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., which Dad had refused to visit with her.
* * *
Dad said, “Crow is my least favorite food. It’s even worse when taken with the recommended slices of humble pie.” He was telling the story of how Mom believed in Harold Washington from the get-go, while he thought the poor man would just lose and lose.
Mom raced into the living room, as though getting away from someone in the hall. She looked over at Aunt Gloria, who still had her head in her hands, the straps of her black patent leather purse wrapped like reins around her hand. The priest pushed through us and sat beside Aunt Gloria, comforting her. We could pretend that the triangle of family weirdness was a vigil for coalition politics in Chicago.
The television’s prayers had let up and we’d come to a political history part of the broadcast. Uncle Ralston tried to raise himself from his chair, his teeth knocking. I didn’t know if he thought to welcome us into the living room or if he was going to attack the television. I was sure I saw Ralston Jr. clock exactly where his father was.
“The negrificity of these proceedings.” Uncle Ralston found his feet. “I object.”
“I know.” Ralston Jr. leaned over. “Chubby Checker and Cassius Clay are the same man. Muhammad Ali is somebody else.”
Dad put a tray of raw celery and carrots in Uncle Ralston’s shaking hands and pushed him back toward the chair. Miniature carrots jumped like Mexican beans in an old-fashioned arcade game. I couldn’t believe that that was Dad. Ralston Jr. swerved away with a grin when his father landed back in the chair with a fart.
“Excuse me,” Dad said and stuck a carrot between Uncle Ralston’s porcelain incisors.
Uncle Ralston would never retire or sell up or invest in anything new. His black suits got shiny with age. When people came to Dad with a plan they wanted him to run by Uncle Ralston, Dad had a way of getting them mired in the muck, remembering how magnificent Texas Instruments had been and how much he admired the company for getting out of oil and in with the government over the whole semiconductor thing. He knew there was no point telling Uncle Ralston anything radical, he who let a chance to get in on the Seaway National Bank go by.
Uncle Ralston did not want women at business meetings, though middle-aged and older black women comprised most of his company at its death. The Eagle had shrunk, and women ran Uncle Ralston’s subsidiary Bible and religious printing businesses. Dad said that the properties owned by Shay Holdings, Inc., including black nursing homes, a medical supply company, and soul food restaurants southeast of the defunct stockyards, didn’t exactly lose money, but they didn’t make enough to keep the newspaper going. It was over. Uncle Ralston was holding the baby carrot like a candle and blinking up at Dad.
“One day we will all get away to that better place.” Mrs. Williams was in the hall, much to my surprise. She entered the living room followed by a thickset man with processed hair. I looked around for Mom.
The thickset man was already working the room, saying, “What’s happening, brother man,” handing out his attorney business card, and telling the women that women were the healers in the black community at times like these, the conjure doctors, the root workers. It was impossible to squeeze his hand, to get the advantage over him in a handshake. I could tell he liked to be the one to let the other guy go. He wore gold rings on both hands, a gold watch on one thick wrist, a gold ID bracelet on the other. His clothes weren’t cheap, but they were inner-city threads, brands popular among blacks, like Cole Haan shoes. They were appropriately gray. His hair smelled like James Brown’s music.
The attorney settled on an arm of Uncle Ralston’s chair, took the vegetables from him, and handed the tray to one of the elderly secretaries, who, like me, was inspecting the only plausible man in the room.
Mrs. Williams came over to me, beaming. “I see you, your nose all up in the air, you sissy,” she whispered. She was smiling away, lightly touching my sleeve. “God’s judgment is upon my grandson as it will land upon you one day, for we are made Hebrew Israelites, not punks.”
“Fifty-fifty box,” Uncle Ralston began, pointing at Aunt Gloria.
“No, no, no, no,” we heard as Aunt Gloria accelerated in heels across Mom’s tricky parquet and raised her purse against Uncle Ralston. She didn’t get to him. The attorney intercepted her easily and scooped her with evident pleasure against his double-breasted wool. “Hold,” he called, as if his voice came from his massive thighs. The priest waited for Aunt Gloria to release the purse into his hands. Mrs. Williams tried to take over Aunt Gloria, but the attorney was not letting go.
“My understanding is that he was alone,” someone said in the crowd that didn’t know whether to keep looking or to act like nothing untoward was happening. “Anything could have gone on in the mayor’s office, for all we know.”