Driving to the back of the vacant field, I parked and got out.
From the street the fence looked solid, with no breaks. But up close there was a rope handle toward the center. I pulled on the hemp loop and the door gave way.
“Who is that?” a man demanded.
“Ezekiel Rawlins,” I declared. “Here to see Hannibal Lee.”
There was a moment of silence, and then from around the trunk of a solitary oak came a man in black slacks and a square-cut milk-chocolate-brown shirt. He had a mid-caliber rifle hanging down from the crook of his right arm.
“I heard’a you,” the light brown Negro allowed. “They say you hang out with pimps and pushers.”
“You just standin’ there, makin’ up shit, right, brother?” was my reply.
“Say what?”
“Have we met?”
“I, uh, don’t think so.”
“Then you should have the sense to know that people talk every day. They say all kinds’a shit. Don’t mean it’s true. Don’t mean it’s anywhere near right. And here you are, spreadin’ rumors ’bout your brother just like the white man want you to.”
I knew what kind of place I was in. I knew the words they used.
The high-yellow Black man considered a moment and then nodded.
“Follow me,” he said.
On the other side of the wood wall was a slender swath of grass.
“Why you need to have an armed guard at an open door?” I asked my guide.
“It’s not usually unlocked,” he said. “I keep watch on the lot, and when I saw you, I took the bolt off the door.”
“Oh.”
Beyond the strip of lawn there was a huge privet hedge, at least as high as the fence. The sentry led me to the center of the hedge and then through a man-size gate that had been overgrown with the dense cover of dark green and oval leaves.
The other side was a real surprise. It was a three-story white house, but instead of the back it was set up like the front. There was a generous porch and welcoming front door.
“Whoa,” I declared.
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s the other side look like?”
“That’s the back’a the house, on One Twenty-Fourth. Beyond that there’s an eleven-foot cinder-block fence to keep us secure.”
“Like a fort, huh?”
The rifleman grinned in reply.
He led me up the stairs and past the front door.
The first floor of the Penguin Club was a large, open area where there were couches, chairs, and tables set here and there. Maybe a dozen club members were seated, deep in conversation, reading, writing, or just thinking. Everyone was Black.
“He’s on the second floor,” my armed guide said.
“What room?”
“They’ll tell you.”
The staircase was wide, with each step cushioned by royal-blue-and-maroon carpeting. The oak-wood banisters were well maintained and there were framed portraits on the walls: Black men and women from every century since the beginning of the Great Enslavement.
“How can I help you?” asked a woman seated behind a black desk. She was young, like almost everyone else at the Penguin Club. Her light brown hair was curly and teased out into an Afro.
“Hannibal Lee.”
“Down the hall to your left,” she said, looking me in the eye. “It’s the cream-and-cranberry door.”
The door of red and white was halfway down the hall and closed. So, I knocked.
“Come in.”
It was a small room, tastefully done in burgundy and wood-dark brown. There was a long slender window that looked over the houses to the east. Set before that frame were two deep red padded chairs, facing each other.
My son was an inch taller than I and dark-skinned like both his parents. His face had character — formed, I believed, by years of decision-making in the face of hard times and distress. In a similar uniform to the sentry down below, he wore black slacks along with a fancy green, square-cut short-sleeved shirt. There were two marks up near the bridge of his nose, telling me that he wore glasses, sometimes.
“Have a seat,” he offered.
I chose the chair to the left of the window. He settled across from me.
“I’m very happy to meet you, son.”
“That makes one of us.”
“Oh, come on now, man. It’s not my fault that I didn’t know about you.”
“You could have looked.”
“No, I couldn’t have. When your mama left Texas, that was all she wrote for me. She didn’t say how I could write, call, or get on a bus to her. And, as far as I knew, she wasn’t pregnant the last time we met.”
Hannibal’s face didn’t change from its stolid expression, except for his eyes. They seemed to be focused on some inner question.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Fifty-two last September.”
After a brief calculation he said, “That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because that would make you fourteen when I was conceived.”
Our eyes met. I didn’t look away.
“Is that true?” he asked.
“You wanna see my driver’s license?”
He wanted to, but didn’t press.
“You were a child,” he averred.
“I’d been on my own since the age of eight. Your mother had from the age of ten. The word child wasn’t in our vocabulary. I loved her more than I’m willin’ to remember. And she cared for me. Only thing I could think was that she thought I was too young to be a father to you.”
Hannibal mixed all those words in the cauldron of his mind. I assumed they jumbled up quite nicely because he couldn’t say any more about me abandoning him.
“What’s this about my brother?” he asked instead.
“Santangelo hired me to find a woman named Lutisha James.”
“My mother.”
“That’s what it turned out to be. The name I knew her by was Anger Lee.”
I told him the rest of the story and he listened closely.
It took him a minute or two to digest the complex tale. Then he said, “I was the one who sent Santangelo to find you.”
“So you already knew about me?”
“I knew your name, and that you were my father, by blood. But I didn’t know it all.”
“When I talked to your brother, after they’d shot him, he said that a white man, probably wearin’ a jacket looked like a checkerboard, was the one that did it. I went out lookin’ for you because whoever killed him, I figured, had you in mind too.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to regain the superiority he felt when I’d walked in. “Now you told me.”
“It’s not just the warnin’. You need to come with me. I can protect you.”
“You expect me to trust you?”
“Did you send your brother to me?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Then you must’a been told by your mother that I was a man to be trusted.”
From there my son went through an internal dialogue. I imagined him thinking of questions, or accusations, and then coming up with the answers I’d give.
Finally, he said, “Where would we go?”
I explained where my house was, reiterating that I wanted him to come there with me. Then I said, “But first you should call Violet and tell her to stay away from anyplace they could find her.”
“You think they’re after her too?”
“They’re after you. And if twistin’ her arm would bring you out, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”
26
“I don’t need your help,” my son said in rebuke. “Whoever it is after me, they don’t know where I am. And even if they did, I’m protected here.”